Manifesto

FFS’s emphasis is on a critical pedagogy using tools from the theatre of the oppressed and participatory action research, aimed at a Mark Fisher inspired “group” form of the feminist practice of consciousness raising.

A future film school implies new ways of working. These range from broad understandings of how film operates in the world, to what an ecosocially just society might be, to practical considerations of how to live ecologically. This is FFS’s manifesto.

FFS believes

  1. All filmmaking is both political and ecological.
  2. Filmmaking carries inheritances from its history and present which are damaging to people and planet. We seek to identify them and find ways of making otherwise.
  3. Those disadvantaged by the world-as-is have the standpoint to tell the stories for a world-as-it-could-be, and they should be the focus of filmmaking education.
  4. Democratic and non-hierarchical filmmaking and education are possible and desired.
  5. In open source and open access: to land, to knowledge, to creative production.
  6. In making with participants, contributors and affected communities. In co-creation.
  7. Film is made by all those, human or non-human, biotic or non-biotic, involved in its creation. This implies ownership and authorship.

FFS strives to be

  1. Place-based, understanding that place extends to the global, solar, and universal.
  2. A filmmaking of the commons, anti-extractivist and anti-colonial in its methods.
  3. Desire-based rather than damage-based. We want to strengthen living well and flourishing, over appealing to the powerful to right their wrongs.
  4. A community of care, not of conformity. We welcome diversity, and reject only coercion and manipulation, their violences and bribes.
  5. Consent-based and trauma-aware. FFS structures, pedagogies, and methods will be subject to confirmation and/or change between participants, arrived at through non-violent communication.
  6. Supportive of infrastructures and economies of care and mutuality for FFS’s funding, supplies and suppliers.
  7. Accountable to the participants, communities, and audiences.
  8. Zero-waste.
  9. Improving ecological health through our actions.

FFS will

  1. Implement the 4-day working week. We will work for 32 hours a week.
  2. With sufficient funding secured, compensate low waged / capital participants for missed subsistence income while taking part.
  3. Favour public, community, and non-profit support. Then workers’ co-ops and finally community benefit / social enterprise for-profit suppliers.
  4. Reject ‘high-end production values’ as the aesthetics of the damaging society.
  5. Only use available lighting.
  6. Distribute as small file media online, and seek carbon-zero distribution.
  7. Embrace second-hand cinema. We reuse recorded material. We reuse equipment.
  8. Use catering with local ingredients from climate and biodiversity positive production.
  9. Take note of what we’re doing, accounting transparently.
  10. Minimise power-use, use renewable power, and favour community power.
  11. Learn where its technologies come from, and collaborate to speed the coming of regenerative, cradle to cradle, future filmmaking technologies.
  12. Bring its film-work first to the people of the Dyfi Watershed, for community peer review, and respect their wishes on whether it can be distributed more widely.
  13. Fail this time. But next time it will fail better.