Shortcut - Young Filmmakers Portray Their Cities

Filmmaking means translating one’s experience and ideas into audiovisual material. In our project Shortcut - reframing the city we would like to encourage our young participants to engage in the process and the accompanying reinterpretation of the reality. The cities we have selected for the project constitute places stereotypically associated with lack of opportunities and social exclusion - war-stricken Belfast, post-industrial, devastated Bytom and Lovetch, a city in the North-central Bulgaria where poor economic and cultural situation rimes with lack of opportunities for young people.They are the places where the young participants of our project grow up, fall in love and develop their passions, the sites of life-changing events that often contradict general perception of the region. In our project students will be invited to prepare their own film portrait of the cities they live in and invited to reflect on the more true to life picture of their city’s community - ambitions and dreams of the local inhabitants, their unique ways of coping with everyday struggles and such challenges as covid epidemic. The project will be carried out in partnership with local organisations which work with young people (as one of their target groups). These institutions will support young participants in gaining deeper and thoughtful insight in the life of their neighbours. Their involvement and the type of provided activity will depend on their profile (school, library, museum, youth centre, culture centre, and others) - e.g. schools will be the site where workshops with short films from the Shortcut toolkit will take place, libraries/youth centres places of meetings with other social groups and inspiring activists, culture centres/museums the sites of creative learning of filmmaking craft. On the top of those meetings and training young people will be challenged to complete social-filmmaking tasks in which they will gather additional information, interview inhabitants, work with found footage, and seek for the visual character of the place. This learning experience will be finalised with a summer camp where the existing footage will be completed with young people’s own personal stories and testimonials and edited. The aim of young people will be to create an intimate film portrait of their cities, a creative attempt to counter the stereotype and unveil the invisible face of their environment.Aims: 1. engaging, connecting and empowering young people from stereotyped environments and increasing social inclusion, by: enabling young people to connect with, express their views and be heard by elected policy-makers, public administrations, interest groups, civil society organisations or individuals active in political or social processes affecting their lives; 2. enhancing critical thinking and media literacy among young people to strengthen democracy and counter manipulation, propaganda and disinformation; 3. broadening and deepening political, civic and social participation of young people at local, regional, national, European or global level; fostering active citizenship and solidarity among young people; 4. promoting intercultural and intergenerational dialogue as well as knowledge about and acceptance of diversity and tolerance in society; 5. strengthening young people's sense of initiative, notably in the social field and to support their communities; 6. equipping young people and adults working with young people with the necessary tools, skills and competences needed to come up with creative and innovative solutions to face unprecedented risks7. unveiling opportunities for creative activities that can be carried out as part of coping with crisis situations8. linking education, training and youth stakeholders with the cultural and creative sector grassroots organisations - networking for the sake of paving new ways of film education also outside school environment 9. training youth workers in using film analysis and filmmaking as their methods of teaching social competences and citizenship skillsActivities: 1. preparation of a toolkit containing educational resources combining film education with social inclusion activities 2. recruitment and work with local partners (e.g. a trio of a school, library, youth centre, or culture centre). Partners support students from the school (7 students per school) in carrying out the tasks. 3. joint staff trainings4. blended learning for youth (school classes, online meetings and tasks plus a physical meeting in form of a summer camp)5. completing the toolkit with good practises regarding conducting film education activities outside schools in a network of coordinating organisations. 6. dissemination events in each country