Summer 2025. Camping with Coetir Anian, Dyfi Watershed, Cymru.
A free forest film course, favouring people restricted from accessing nonfiction filmmaking education. Accommodation and food provided.
The FFilm School is an attempt to learn nonfiction filmmaking with methods fit for a just and flourishing future, with the wellbeing of future generations prioritised. FFS believes that ecological change means how we make films, how we tell stories, our methods, looks and sounds, also change. This course is for people who are politically engaged, believe that another world is possible, and want to be part of finding the way there.
Ffilm is Welsh film. English needs that other F: for Future Film School, Forest Film School, Feral Film School.
FFS is a two-week residency camping in the wildwood, where we work and play and make together. FFS is a ‘for fuck’s sake’ call to make films otherwise. Make it better.
Eight collaborators, two weeks, filmmaking together, learning together in the Dyfi Watershed from our camp on Bwlch Corog.
You’ll learn nonfiction filmmaking with high quality equipment, with experienced filmmakers, from idea generation to distribution, but with a questioning eye, ear and mind. What methods and ideas have we inherited which are not fit for the future?
FFS is trying to work in ways which are anti-extractivist; that is, FFS is trying to work in ways that oppose the assumptions of the cultures that have led us to climate change and biodiversity loss, the assumption that you can take without reciprocal obligations.
This course is for people with strong relations to the Dyfi watershed. This is an inclusive understanding of relations. Refugees are most definitely welcome here.
FFS is for those disadvantaged by the world-as-it-is to offer their visions of the world-as-it-could-be.
We favour applications from those who don’t easily gain access to filmmaking education, particularly due to financial, class, and care-related barriers.
FFS is free to take part and if we can fund it, paid.
James Price (he/him) has conceived of and designed the FFilm School. James is a filmmaker-artist-scholar and has been teaching filmmaking in HE since 2009. He is researching how nonfiction filmmaking education can be made fit for the future, between Aberystwyth and UWE Bristol. The FFilm School is part of this PhD research.
Anne Marie Carty (she/her) is a Dyfi watershed, Welsh-speaking filmmaker, who since 1995 has been using locally-made film as triggers for community reflection, discussion and dialogue. Her PhD research explores community consultation and finding lower carbon filmmaking methods, trying to work carefully with both people and planet.
Altaea Fradley (she/her) is feeding the FFS. Altaea studied Ecology at Aberystwyth University, before developing a local & organic veg box scheme in the Aberystwyth & Dyfi Biosphere Reserve area.
Practicals
Place and Accommodation
FFS is place-based. That place is the Dyfi watershed, the lands where rainfall might drain to the Irish Sea through the Dyfi river.
The course is residential, camping on the hillside of Bwlch Corog with Coetir Anian, the Cambrian Wildwood, and in the barn, Einion at Cefn Coch.
Time
Friday 13th to Friday 27th September.
Working hours: 32-hours per week.
Food
Three meals a day, with ingredients sourced from regenerative and low-carbon local food providers. Plant-centred, but Altaea also offers low-impact, high-welfare animal products. Fully-vegan options always available.