is the course for?

• are you living in a low-income, low-capital household?
• do you have a strong connection to the Dyfi, Rheidol, and Ystwyth watersheds?
• are you over 18 and not in full-time education?
• do you have leave to remain & right to work in the UK? (We didn’t want to do this one.)
• can you join us for 10th-18th January and 24th April to 1st May?

FfilmSchool 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. Not all barriers are financial. In line with Ffilm Cymru Wales’ Film for Everyone Action Plan FfilmSchool automatically offers interviews to those strongly connected to the area who identify as one or more of:

• living in a low-income, low-asset household
• d/Deaf, Disabled, and/or Neurodiverse
• having Welsh as a first language
• a person of the Global Majority (including Roma and Traveller)

FfS pays conspirators to compensate them for missed subsistence income or lost care while taking part, at the BFI Creative Challenge rate of £13.75ph for a 40-hour week, or £550 a week, but using the 4-day-week’s 32-hour working-week. This works out at £17.19ph. All workers on the project, including the project leaders, are paid at the same rate.

We’re looking for applications from people resident in, historically connected to, and/or with strong relations to the Dyfi, Rheidol, and Ystwyth watersheds. This is an inclusive understanding of connection. Refugees are most welcome here, but sadly we are limited to those with the right to work and leave to remain in the UK. There’s no maximum age. You need to be available for the two residential weeks of the course: 10^th-18^th January and 24^th April – 2^nd May 2026.

We recognise how difficult this residential format makes life for those with caring responsibilities, and we have a fund available to help with childcare costs for successful applicants to arrange their own care.

A Forest film School based on a hillside 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. Please see our practicals: access, care, health & safety. The contribution of those disabled by the world-as-it-is are vital for making a just world.

who 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 major funding is from CO₂RE– the UK’s research hub on greenhouse gas removal, a key part of net-zero targets. FfS is one of 7 artistic projects CO₂RE have funded. These represent a tiny fraction of CO₂RE’s budget which comes from UKRI, a public body funded by the UK government through taxation. Accepting CO₂RE funding has led us to focus on the effects large scale adoption of greenhouse gas removal activities could have on land, on communities, and on our mental worlds. We strive to remain critical and independent as we make work on their work. Please hold us accountable for whether we do so.

We are also funded by Ffilm Cymru Wales‘s Connector Fund. Ffilm Cymru Wales is a community interest company (CIC) funded by the Arts Council of Wales, the National Lottery and supported by the Welsh Government and the BFI. Conspirator payments are entirely funded with the Ffilm Cymru Wales money. As conspirators are not paid by CO₂RE this helps safeguard the editorial independence of the film. The six conspirators, acting as a Community Documentary Steering Group, have the final say on how the film is edited. The conspirator-guides – James and Laura – not being of the community, can only offer thoughts. They don’t have a vote.

Finally some activities and training have been funded by SWWDTP (the South, West, and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership) as part of James’s PhD support. SWWDTP is a part of AHRC, also a part of UKRI. James’s universities Aberystwyth and Bristol, his supervisors Kim Knowles and Steve Presence, and lots of other staff have provided support in kind. This ranges from the use of Aberystwyth’s video equipment (thank you Paddy and Jon) an electric vehicle, to the efforts and advice of the research ethics team.

I want to also acknowledge the contribution of the people who’ve let me stay in their homes and talk things through – Mars, Guy, Miranda and Ash, Daniel and Corin and Cairi, Kim and Tree, my partner Claire and my family and friends. The conversations and guidance from many offered without charge, to name but some – Maria Velez-Serna, Christo Wallers, Natalia Eernstman and the team at Black Mountains College who ran the Climate Adaptation for Creatives course, Muriel Tinel-Temple, NECS Degrowth Reading Group, BAFTSS Media+Environment, Chris Nunn, Jessica Edwards, James Weddup, Joe Hope at Cefn Coch, Simon Ayers and Katy Harris at Coetir Anian, Paul Allen at CAT, Barbara Grantham at TrydaNi, Kate and Cath at Eco Hub Aber, Altaea Fradley, Anne Marie Carty, Will Tremlett and others at Stiwdio Dyfi and their many(!) associated projects. Collaboration takes many forms, far from financial transactions.

FfS aims to turn this funding and generosity 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 fee 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

people

James Price (he/him) has conceived of and designed the FfilmSchool. James is a Londoner of English and Welsh heritage, a father-carer of two kids, 9 and 11, 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, most recently at the London Film Academy and Met Film School, after long-term positions at Brighton and UCL. He is Documentary and Green officer for NAHEMI, the association for Higher Education UK filmmaking educators. Since 2021 James has been researching how documentary filmmaking education can be made socio-ecologically fit for the future, between Prifysgol Aberystwyth and Bristol University. He is supported by AHRC’s South, West, and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership. FfilmSchool is the research practice of the PhD, putting these ideas into practice, seeing what happens, making new work.

Laura Harrington (she/her) is a Cymraeg artist, researcher and organiser from Mid-Wales who works with film. Her work considers the complex relations between humans and landscapes, often working collaboratively on long-term co-productive practices with landscape. She works in uplands, peatlands and rivers, connecting what she calls an upstream consciousness to global currents.

Anne Marie Carty (she/her) is a Dyfi watershed, Welsh-speaking English 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.

Chris Allen (he/him) is a Londoner, filmmaker, and leads the live-cinema and audiovisual innovators The Light Surgeons. He will be guiding our participants in a live cinema workshop and performance to close our Spring residential. James worked for the Surgeons in the early Noughties, and they’ve collaborated ever since.

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.

Cairi Jacks (she/her) is assisting with FfS. Cairi is a singer and visual artist local to our Dyfi base who explores themes of belonging, kinship and our relationship to land through a mixture of original compositions and traditional folk songs. Rooted in the oral tradition, with fireside singing in her blood, and a craft honed through acapella harmony singing, she is now bringing the many threads of her practice together.

hosts

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 indoor accommodation, 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.

supporters

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 Stiwdio Dyfi, a creative hub and CIC for the Dyfi who inspire a wealth of creativity in the region from the Clwb Fideo to Machynlleth’s new venue Sploj, home to Radio Dyfi. If funds allow, and if conspirators agree, Clwb Fideo could be filming a behind the scenes of FfilmSchool in action.

FfS is supported by the 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 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 BMC, Black Mountains College. BMC is a unique college in and around the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park, Wales. BMC focuses on the challenge of our times: how to build a fair and just society within safe planetary boundaries.

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.

FfS is supported by the Light Surgeons, a media art studio based in East London led by Chris Allen that creates audio-visual projects that combine documentary film, animation, and interaction with original audio production. They craft live cinema performances, installations, and immersive experiences.