Abstract
In the first part of this article, the author reflects on her experience of making filmmaking workshops with young people in Australia, China and the UK an integral component of a research project on the representation of child migrants and refugees in world cinema. She then sets her approach to these workshops in the context of Alain Bergala's ideas about film education, of which she had initially been unaware. In discussing a couple of further workshops that she ran in the UK and Australia as part of the 'Cinéma, cent ans de jeunesse' programme, she focuses particularly on the benign or obstructive role of institutional gatekeepers, who act as intermediaries or agents determining the terms of access to children and young people for film educators, researchers and practitioners. The legal, protective and ethical dimensions of the relationship between educator, gatekeeper and participating students are discussed. The article cites cases in which the interaction worked well, and others in which it proved problematic. The functions, responsibilities and potential drawbacks of gatekeepers are compared with Bergala's conception of the pedagogic role of the passeur – a figure who also holds power in relation to young people's access to film and film-making, but one that connotes positive, even magical, properties.
Highlights
In the first part of this article, the author reflects on her experience of making filmmaking workshops with young people in Australia, China and the UK an integral component of a research project on the representation of child migrants and refugees in world cinema
My topic was the representation of migrant and refugee children in world cinema, and that strand of the work duly led to the publication of my monograph, There’s No Place Like Home (Donald, 2018)
I shall turn to my UK-based workshops, and consider the extent to which they did or did not lend substance to Bergala’s worries about the possibility of institutional interference with the liberating cinephilia of the passeur
Summary
Starting in 2013, working with a number of academic and professional collaborators, I embarked on a series of film workshops with children and young people who had experienced different types of migration in Australia, China and the UK. The film’s formal achievement lay in the way that the students separated protagonists in open space, through screens, and through shots that fragmented and displaced the viewer’s orientation to time and place Their journey, and the discoveries that this made possible, seemed to me very similar to the result of workshops that I had held in China three years earlier ( the children there had been much younger). At the end of the graduation ceremony, one of the research team was approached by a woman who had been instrumental in founding the school She had enjoyed the presentation and was pleased it had been uploaded onto our website, so that people all over the world would have an opportunity to learn about the children’s specific participation in this project, but about the positive aspects of Afghan culture more generally. We were not confident that this procedure would be followed, but there was little we could do about that
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