To love a film, you must be a potential filmmaker; you must say to yourself: but I would have done it this way or that; you yourself have to be a filmmaker, be it only in your imagination,
but you have to make them.
Jean Renoir

• From May 4th through 6th, the Cineteca Madrid will host this seminar on the relationship between education and film.
   
• The festival will bring together such international specialists as French film critic Alain Bergala and documentary filmmaker Vincent Carelli; Carlos Muguiro, director of the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, and leaders from Subframes, Cinema en Curs, Aulafilm and Pedagogías Invisibles will be taking part in the seminar.
   
• Admission is open to educators, filmmakers, researchers and the general public. Anyone interested can request a spot starting in April on the festival website.

The program of the 15th edition of DocumentaMadrid includes the seminar Pedagogical practices in the creative process, ways of passing on the art of filmmaking, a meeting place for reflecting on how audiovisual art gets transmitted and the relationship between cinema and education.

For three days, recognized professionals such as the French film critic Alain Bergala and the Franco-Brazilian documentary-maker and anthropologist Vincent Carelli will take the stage at the Cineteca Madrid to lead an intensive seminar in which they will share their experiences in the fields of documentary filmmaking, education, audiovisual research, anthropology, social activism and new pedagogical practices.

The seminar will be held at the Plató hall at the Cineteca Madrid (Plaza de Legazpi, Madrid) on  May 4th, 5th and 6th and is meant for educators, filmmakers, researchers and anyone interested in the relationship between education and cinema.

The first day will kick off with a lecture by Alain Bergala. A former chief editor of Cahiers du Cinéma and author of The Cinema Hypothesis (2007), he revolutionized film education in the 1970s through the concept pedagogy of the creative process, in which he argues that art is not taught but rather found, experienced and transmitted in ways different from those of other established school subjects. School is the place where that meeting might take place and where the spectator can become a creator.

For Noemí García, academic and the seminar coordinator, it is Bergala's paradigm that serves as the starting point for these conferences, which "encourage the exchange of educational ideas in the field of standardized education, colleges, institutes and universities, film schools and alternative pedagogical practices fostering the development of critical thinking, citizen participation, collaborative learning and the exploration of everyday life through art. "

On Friday the 4th, we will also get the chance to learn about the pedagogical program of Cinema en Curs and attend a round table moderated by Marina Díaz - Head of Cinema at the Instituto Cervantes - on cinema in the classroom, which will also feature specialists from Drac Màgic and Aulafilm, the filmmaker Ignacio Agüero, and Publio Pérez Prieto, high-school teacher and artist. In addition, the day will close with a screening of 100 niños esperando un tren, to be followed by a talk with its director, Ignacio Agüero.

Ignacio Agüero is one of the most widely-known Chilean filmmakers in the world thanks to such films as El diario de Agustín, Aqui se construye and 100 niños esperando un tren itself, which under the pretext of holding a documentary film workshop in a working-class town in Chile, launched a powerful critique of the Pinochet regime and poverty caused by political repression. In 2014, Agüero organized the international seminar EL CINE ES ESCUELA at the University of Chile, which also featured Alain Bergala as its main invited guest. For the filmmaker, his relationship with education is fundamental to his career: "Apart from my films, I feel the most important thing I do is my work at the film school and network Cero en Conducta".

The second session will deal with the role of film schools and universities in teaching film, from the point of view of artistic creation. We will enjoy the involvement of Carlos Muguiro, academic director of the groundbreaking school Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola; Javier Rebollo, screenwriter, producer, director and professor at the ECAM and  Pompeu Fabra University; Josep María Catalá, former academic director of the Masters in Original Documentary Film at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona; Pablo Useros, director of  LAV Masters, Laboratory of contemporary audiovisual creation and practice; and Maria Luisa Ortega, professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Following the round table will be a screening of Lo que dirán, produced by the Masters in Theory and Practice of Creative Documentary Film at the UAB.

The lecture by the founder and former director of the Punto de Vista festival, Carlos Muguiro, will be one of the seminar's highlights. Muguiro is a university professor specializing in Audiovisual Aesthetics, a filmmaker, curator and film programmer. His project "The Cinema Hypothesis", in which he proposed a new creator-centered model for film schools, made him the director of the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, at the Tabakalera in San Sebastián. In close collaboration with the Basque Film Archive and the San Sebastian Film Festival, the school promotes a new way of teaching audiovisuals.

Sunday the 6th will be focused on Video, community, co-learning and social activism, with a talk on film training by the documentary maker Vincent Carelli. Since 1987, this Franco-Brazilian filmmaker and anthropologist has been in charge of the teaching project Video nas aldeias (Video in the Villages), which brings indigenous populations of Brazil into the audiovisual sector and encourages them to take an active role as audiovisual documentalists of their own situations. Thanks to these tools, he has produced over 70 ethnographic documentaries screened throughout the world and in 1999 he received the UNESCO Award.

On the last day, members of the Subtramas collective , Pedagogías invisibles, Cine sin autor and Las Lindes from the Dos de Mayo Art Center will join the round table to discuss alternative pedagogical practices for citizen involvement and collaborative learning; and then, the seminar will close with a screening of the award winning film from the 2016 Mar del Plata Festival, Martirio, presented by Vincent Carelli himself, and Adentro, with a talk by its director, Pau Coll, who will also be participating in the round table beforehand. Adentro is a collective film co-produced by young prisoners in Catalonia and was the winner of the Movistar + Award at DocumentaMadrid 2017.

David Varela and Andrea Guzmán, the DocumentaMadrid co-directors, are "sure this seminar will provide a unique for furthering this ongoing debate for our society, in which we get professionals from the sector, the educational community and public institutions all involved " in order to "strengthen ties and firm up measures that will lead to verifiable progress in the field of teaching and learning audiovisuals both in and outside our borders. "

Registration is open as long as there are spots available, using a confirmation form that will be posted starting in April on the DocumentaMadrid website.

You can access material and the Press Kit here

To arrange reporting / interviews, please contact:

Beatriz Asín
DocumentaMadrid Communication Team
prensa@documentamadrid.com / (0034) 637 941 980

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