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Making a Resilience Film

An Intensive Workshop

This intensive session,will be based on the students’ resilience experiences.

Technically, the course is a deconstruction that will concentrate on developing writing skills

for resilient cinema and translating narratives into film images. The workshop encompasses

analyses of:

· story lines and patterns

· structure(s) of character behaviour and subjectivity

· predictable elements

· manipulative parameters

· truth, hidden or embedded information

· differing interpretations of a singular narrative

The subject matters will be taken from the real-life resilient experiences. Those stories will be reproduced through moving pictures and sound.

Thematically, the course will is an attempt to create a film for an audience of resilient individuals that have lived the a trauma at a double level; in reality and its representation. The principle is to use in film storytelling the mechanisms of narrative identity and develop an"inner story" for resilient struggling against the invisible ghosts of a society that creates unreal images and then forces individuals to conform to them, constantly making them feel that they are in conflict with an illusory norm.

Theoretically, the course will introduce students to a comparative study of fiction and reality using the film editor perspective. Students will increase their understanding of:

· The film language through editing

· The knowledge acquisition process as an auteur filmmaker

Since this is an intensive two days session, students will be expected to remain current with required readings, written assignments, and production schedules.

*The word resilience comes from the latin word "resalire" that means "bounce back" and was first used by the internationally recognised developmental psychologist Emmy Werner who has spent a lifetime studying how children

cope when confronted with adversity.

Epidemiological research by the World Health Organisation shows that one out of two people has been or will be seriously traumatised at some time during their life (by war, violence, rape, cruelty, incest, etc.). One in four will experience at least two serious traumas. The rest are also bound to fall on some hard times. Yet the notion of resilience, which is a person’s ability to grow in the face of terrible problems, had not been scientifically studied until recently. Today, it’s all the rage in many countries. In Latin America, they have resilience institutes, in Holland

and Germany they have resilience universities. In the United States, you hear the word all the time. The World

Trade Center towers have even been nicknamed “the twin resilient towers” by those who want to rebuild them.

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