For this first year, FFS will be a small gathering. Eight collaborators, two weeks, learning and filmmaking together throughout the Dyfi Watershed from our base-camp on Bwlch Corog. FFS is evolving a course framework, which the selected participants will review and inform; prompts for action for when we come together in September. 

Over the two weeks the collaborators will 

• reflect on the act of filmmaking, and the inherited assumptions of audience, of practice, of intention that each bring with them,
• explore nonfiction grammars through screenings and discussion, 
• pursue desire-centred co-creation with the lands and communities both in front of the lens and outside the frame.
• critically navigate access, ownership and property, both physical and intellectual.
• gather secondhand images and sounds, 
• decide when to glean new ones in available light with our bodies, cameras and sound equipment. FFS makes a point of using secondhand equipment to make small-file rushes, rejecting the neoliberal drives for ever growing resolution and disempowering automation. We want to make neoliberal aesthetics look old.
• use the Kdenlive open source, free editor, in the braiding of our collaborative film, thinking of how narratives carry meaning. 
• think about the future, for distribution, and beyond – for ways of organising long-lasting democratic post-growth filmmaking economies.

We might hike the watershed divide, or down the streams to the sea. We might start with a frame of the landscape, then trace out from there: the land relations in the image; where our kit has come from; where and how these images might be seen. FFS desires a pedagogy of consent, and so is open to suggestion and change.  We will make film work together, deciding collectively how it will live after the course: as a single film, as a collection of works, as a performance. We will contribute all rushes created in the course to the open planet initiative.

FFS is committed to reflecting on what we are doing when we gather material, the meaning of what we use to do that, and of how we approach gathering and making. FFS is trying to work in ways which are anti-extractivist; that is, FFS is trying to be ecologically and socially just; FFS is pursuing good relations with the lands, groups, and minds we make inside of. We’re not expecting to be perfect – the world we’re working in isn’t, so it’s by no means easy – but this is a chance to start imagining how things could be, making soil from which future projects might grow.