Who
is the course for?
Applications from those resident in, historically connected to, and with strong relations to the Dyfi watershed are encouraged. This is an inclusive understanding of connection. For example, we would strongly favour applications from Coetir Anian’s Wolverhampton City of Sanctuary refugee programme. FFS is only able to take participants aged over 18. There’s no maximum age.
FFS aims to empower 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 monetary constraints. FFS is free to take part. With sufficient funding gifted, we will compensate low waged / low capital participants for missed subsistence income while taking part, at the BFI Creative Challenge rate of £13.75ph for a 40-hour week, or £550 a week, in line with the 4-day-week’s 32-hour protocol. In the lucky event of sufficient funding being found, all collaborators will be paid.
We recognise the difficulty for those with caring responsibilities this residential format requires, and invite co-carers to camp alongside, or in the case of sole carers we can look into providing care during collaborator working hours.
A Forest Film School based on a mountainside presents challenges for access-for-all. We commit to doing our utmost to enable access, inviting guidance on practical measures to make participation genuinely accessible. The contribution of those disabled by the world-as-it-is are vital for making a just world.
Please express your interest in taking part by clicking apply, where we invite you to tell us about your story, your values, and your desires for the future, both your own and the wider world. .
is funding this?
FFS is not autonomous. This project relies on funding from the UK and devolved Cymru academic and film bodies, as well as support in kind by our hosts and our suppliers, our web hosts and the places we are staying, our tents, our fuel – food, fire and electricity, our recording equipment, transport and eventually, the way the work that comes out of this gets shown. FFS’s primary funding is from SWWDTP as part of James’s PhD support. SWWDTP is a part of AHRC, itself a part of UKRI, a public body funded by the UK government through taxation. We are also hoping to be funded by Ffilm Cymru’s Connector Fund. FFS uses this funding to explore ways of living well, filming well in these times. At every stage we will try to engage with organisations which are non-profit and community interest, and where that proves impossible, with worker-coops and for-profit community benefit / social enterprise businesses.
To what uses are these funds put? First is to enable access to those who would otherwise be unable to take part, so paying a grant to cover missed earnings they cannot do without, and providing care for those who cannot do without FFS collaborators’ care. Our costs include the site hires at Coetir Anian and Cefn Coch, tent and bedding hire, site electricity, low-carbon vehicle hire and charging, food and drink costs, and equipment hire. Much of this might be possible to source cheaply, free of charge, or through in-kind assistance. We intend making a virtue of using lower end technology or that considered obsolete.
we are
James Price (he/him) has conceived of and designed the FFilm School. James is a Londoner of English and Welsh heritage, a father-carer of two primary-aged kids, a partner, and a filmmaker-artist-scholar trained at the National Film and Television School (NFTS). James makes work for TV, festivals, galleries, as well as live projection performances and museum installations since the late 90s. From the late 00s James has been teaching filmmaking and is currently lecturing at the London Film Academy and Met Film, following long-term positions at Brighton and UCL. He is Documentary and Green officer for NAHEMI, the association for tertiary UK filmmaking educators. Since 2021, as his other “I”, James Staunton-Price, he has been researching how filmmaking education can be made socio-ecologically fit for the future, between Prifysgol Aberystwyth and UWE. He is supported by AHRC’s South, West, and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership, the principal funders of this course. The FFilm School is part of his PhD research, putting these ideas into practice, seeing what happens, making new work.
Anne Marie Carty (she/her) is a Dyfi watershed, Welsh-speaking filmmaker. After some years of doing participatory video work and working for the BBC in London Anne Marie trained as a documentary filmmaker at the NFTS, worked in broadcast TV and delivered media training. To understand more about the ethics of documentary filmmaking relationships and how different communities function Anne Marie did an MPhil in Ethnographic Documentary at the University of Manchester. She has been developing the use of locally-made film as triggers for community reflection, discussion and dialogue in rural Wales where she has lived and worked since 1995. She has been further developing these techniques as PhD research at the University of Westminster, exploring the role of community consultation in documentary film production for fairer community representation and at the same time finding ways to have a lower carbon-impact in film production, 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. Nowadays she is working as a freelance chef, focusing on charity & third sector groups and championing the use of sustainable ingredients, as well as cooking for private events and guests. In her spare time you’ll find her butchering game, foraging by the seaside and reenacting medieval life in castles.
Coetir Anian, the Cambrian Wildwood, our co-host, is set in the uplands of Mid Wales near the River Dyfi and the sea. It is a place and a project restoring the habitats and species of this landscape and giving people deep nature experiences in a wild setting. Its patrons include Jane Davidson, author of Cymru’s ground-breaking Wellbeing of Future Generations Act, 2015, which made protecting future generations the central organising principle of government.
Cefn Coch, our co-host providing us with our barn accommodation Einion, is a regenerative farm run by ecologist farmer Joe Hope, Chairperson of Coetir Anian. Joe is an expert on Celtic rainforest, as featured in chapter 5 of Guy Shrubsole’s Lost Rainforests of Britain.
Gandi.net are our online hosts. Gandi support web hosting for alternative projects including for many of the world’s most important open alternative economy and campaigning initiatives including creative commons, ubuntu, VLC, openstreetmap and Medicins Sans Frontières. They have provided FFS hosting free of charge.
FFS is funded as a DFC, Documentary Film Council project. DFC is an organisation for the UK’s independent documentary film practitioners. It is a charitable co-operative run by and for its members on behalf of the documentary community.
FFS is supported by the RFN, the Radical Film Network, an international network for individuals and organisations involved in politically-engaged and aesthetically innovative film culture.
FFS is supported by the GFSA, the Green Film School Alliance, an international, educator-led alliance, pursuing a future where “sustainable production” is synonymous with “production” by integrating environmentally responsible practices into film school curricula globally.
FFS is supported by NAHEMI, the National Association for Higher Education in the Moving Image, the national body for filmmaking / moving image educators in tertiary education.