In association with the Croatian Audiovisual Centre, for the second year round KinoKino Festival organises a workshop in teacher training with a focus on teaching short film – for teachers in primary and secondary schools. From Cinema to Classroom is a programme dedicated to short film teaching methods and designed to provide the participants with teaching tools to organise a theme class, either as a media culture subject within the Croatian language syllabus, or as a tool for other syllabi or intersyllabi. In addition to Croatian language teachers, the workshop is suitable for teachers of visual art and art history, educators, school librarians, teacher training students and all other employees in the education sector focusing on film and media.

The programme developed from a collaboration launched at the first edition of KinoKino, in 2016, during a public discussion on the Comprehensive Curricular Reform, when we jointly organised a roundtable on the role of teachers in the development of cinematic and audiovisual culture, with the intention of – now in a practical and implementable form – building a long-term collaboration with the educational system, with the aim of increasing the quantity and quality of film teaching, as well as vocational education in the field of film art. In the four workshop slots, the participants will be given a chance to see and analyse some of the finest titles among contemporary Croatian short films of all genres: fiction, documentary, animation, experimental. Some of the new titles in the programme are: Nikola Tesla’s Secret Laboratory by Bruno Razum, Dota by Petra Zlonoga, Simulacra by Ivana Bošnjak and Thomas Johnson, The Beast by Daina Oniunas Pusić, The Girl Who Loved Fairy-Tales by Čejen Černić… Also, for the first-timers, we will repeat the selection of films considered the most suitable for teaching purposes by the last year’s participants: The Chicken by Una Gunjak, the winner of the EFA Award for Best Short Film in 2014, the experimental film The Market by Ana Hušman, followed by films about school-related topics like Sweetie by Aldo Tardozzi, showing first-grader Tvrtko’s first walk to school on his own, and the drama We Aren’t Talking About You but About the Children by Luka Rukavina, set at a parent-teacher meeting in a high school.

The workshop mentors are Ana Đordić, a professor of Croatian language and literature and extracurricular film classes at Zagreb’s XIII Gymnasium, Ivona Marendić, a professor of art and extracurricular film art classes at the School of Applied Art and Design in Zagreb, and Jelena Modrić, an associate professor at the Department of Editing, Academy of Dramatic Art. Professors Đordić and Modrić are also attending a PhD course in Literature, Performance Arts, Film and Culture at the Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. They teach film professionally as part of the Croatian Film Association, namely the seminar Film Teaching at the Ante Peterlić Media Culture School and Film Classes at Tuškanac Cinema during summer, winter and spring holidays. Professor Marendić introduced film as an extracurricular activity to the School of Applied Art and Design in 2016/2017, as a result of the collaboration evolved at workshops and teacher training programmes organised as part of the Film Literacy Project launched by the Croatian Audiovisual Centre.