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Filming: The Face of the Future

The International School for Film and Television (EICTV) is the project of the New Latin American Cinema Movement. Nicknamed the School of Three Worlds, it opened its doors in 1986 with Fernando Birri, a pioneer of the movement, as its first director. The current director is Brazilian filmmaker and journalist Orlando Senna, and the staff includes well-known Cuban and Latin American media professionals. Senna says that while the school is seven years old it continues to take shape through the many people who participate in it: the 174 students who have attended the regular two year program in film, television and video production and nearly 800 students and professionals who have attended workshops and conferences. The great majority of participants come from Latin America, though a handful of African, Asian, Spanish, and Chicano students have attended. In 1993 EICTV received the esteemed Rossellini Award at the Cannes Film Festival, joining the company of Martin Scorcese, The French Cinematique and England's Channel Four. The school has a clear mission. Andres Malatesta, a Peruvian film and TV producer currently in charge of production, said that for its instructors, the mission is to rescue the image of Latin America, "which day by day disappears on their TVs and movie screens. When I watch TV, I see Miami Beach, I see New York, or Los Angeles. I know the United States much more than I know my own country. In order for a country to be considered credit-worthy [by the World Band or International Monetary Fund!, it must be `liberal,' `neo-liberal,' it can't protect its own film industry, it cannot protect its image. We say in Latin America that a country without film is a country without a face. And we're fighting against that." The school is the only one of its kind in Latin America, a unique opportunity to view films, learn production techniques and make contacts All students receive full scholarships for tuition, room, and board so no one is turned away for lack of money. Consequently there is intense competition to get in, often with more than 100 students competing for the two or three scholarships available per country. "There's a lot of anxiety," student Manuel Alvares confessed, "people are looking for this kind of place and we can't find it. When a little window is opened, like this school, people want to go there. Because they have the desire, they have the drive, and they're ready for it." Once there, students are transformed by their first contact with the world of cinema, by their immersion in production, by just being in Cuba. Damon explained, "In Jamaica all I would see are American films. Once in a while you get a new foreign movie, I mean, not from the U.S. When I came here I was exposed to Kurosawa and Latin American filmmakers, and the masters, the Russians." There are two main tenets to EICTV's pedagogical approach; one, that practice comes before theory, so that theory emerges from the work itself; and second, the idea of polyvalence, that students to some extent master each aspect of the production process before they move on to specialize. Students spend two years in the program. The first year students concentrate on skills, working in production groups acting as crew for one another. Each student directs a five-minute fiction film in the fall semester, and a documentary video in the spring semester. In the second year they specialize. Students, staff, instructors, and visitors are all recruited as cast members or crew. The curriculum has evolved from a strident stand against evaluations and exams to implementation of a skills evaluation after the first year. This assures that a student choosing a specialization for their second year has achieved an overall level of competency and demonstrated some sort of aptitude for their specialty. While the motivation of the school is ideological, a mission to protect the vision and imagination of Latin America's (and to some degree, the Third World's) audiovisual media, the daily work of the students is intensely concentrated on craft: "We ask the students that they apply themselves to technical mastery--how to use the equipment. …