The Traveling Film School

One billion children are growing up in poverty.
Each has hopes, heroes, ghosts
and a rich story to tell.

The Traveling Film School is a tuition-free film school that travels to underdeveloped regions where there are no filmmaking institutions. 

The School is, in fact, three separate but joined educational programs.  There are two school sessions: the Film Production Program and the Theater program.  Both are followed by an intense vocational training via the filming of an Experimental Feature Production.

The Filmmaker Program:

The Filmmaker Program is a two week course, free of charge, which teaches students to use digital equipment to make a series of short films of their own.  After the classes a student film-show takes place. 

The Theater Program:

Parallel to the Filmmaker Program, we run a free radical-theater summer camp program for children and local art institutions.  Most recently, we worked with a group of homeless children in Cameroon, Africa.

The School’s Experimental Feature Production:

On completing either program students are given the chance to continue on by volunteering to be part of the crew and cast of The School’s experimental feature production.

The School’s experimental features have a central thrust; to highlight-with authenticity-the conditions, dreams, and pressures people are living with in the regions we journey to.  We have a broad agenda to make films that help bring attention to the lives of the billion children living in poverty.  

Practically, this can be seen in the film titled The Tree Of Ghibet which began as an experiment in filmmaking without a screenplay. Instead, we created a simple plotline and filledl it in with a series of improvisations in radical theater, enacted with people from the local area.  This process came from two competing impulses:

First, we didn't want to descend on Cameroon with an inauthentic, outsider’s viewpoint of local living conditions and then impose that ideal.  We also didn’t want to reenact our misconceptions with actors from other regions (we recognize that in the areas that the Traveling Film School works in, there are few or no conventionally-trained actors).  Authentic portrayal was paramount.  Our challenge was to work with non-actors, in our short time, with a miniscule production budget.

So, without the time, money, or resources to make a film in traditional methods, our plan became to forget ordinary first-world filmmaking rules.  We decided to jump into the film camp with a plot line and create story through improvisation, theater games, interviews, storytelling sessions, and personalization exercises to incorporate the stories and experiences of the local culture as best we could.  We wanted to allow the children to put their own hopes, experiences, beliefs, and fears about being homeless into a narrative in a fresh way.

The Traveling Film School is still an ongoing experiment – we are currently raising funds for projects in Brazil and India.