KinoEyes and Viewfinder
We are small and unique country which through miracle and great work has its own national cinema. As it stands in the Estonian Film Development Plan, Estonian film is successful if we have professional filmmakers and audience who value Estonian film and understand film language.
So a small country with national cinema should have film studies in all levels of schooling. Full education requires that in one area there is a bachelor, masters, and doctoral studies. That will make the studies whole, including those who want to go directly work with films, as well as those who want to explore the depth of their profession.
BFM was created with great help of the Nordic countries, they supported international MA program. Which was led by NY University professor Boris Frumin and the European Federation of Cinematographers (IMAGO) president Andreas Fisher Hansen.
When external resources exhausted we had to start thinking about what comes next. Then Jüri Sillart opened a semi-open international MA program, in which a third of the students came from outside of the film department, but the majority went to the MA program immediately after bachelor studies in BFM. I believe that this course was a strong footprint on the landscape of Estonian film. As one of the students Triin Ruumet recently reached her feature film debut. Also Clermont-Ferrand selected film “Olga” which was directed by Kaur Kokk also from Sillart course.
After Jüri Sillart programme the question remained - how to offer our bachelor students the opportunity to continue their studies in an international environment. The answer was master´s degree program KinoEyes which cooperation with the Screen Academy Scotland, BFM, and Lisbon Lusofona University. Addition to the fact that students study in all three countries and schools, the entire course is very international as there are students from all around the world.
We understood that this program provides better quality than one school alone would be able to. Therefore an application was submitted to the European Commission to support creating united professional MA program for cinematographers.
At first we did one project through Erasmus program. From that we learned about each other's teaching methods, conditions and environment. As a result, it became clear that each school has its own specific characteristics, which can be very useful for the united program. Hungary has 150 years of teaching cinema. Irish film school is part of the Anglo-American film culture. Ireland has a lot of direct contacts between film industry also many of international tv series and movies are made there. BFM from these three schools may be the most technically modern. It seemed that all of the schools together can offer more than an individual school and so began the “Viewfinder”, and so the European Commission supported second BFM united master program. In this program student's first semester will take place in Dublin, the second semester in Hungary and the third semester in BFM. In the fourth semester, the students are divided between the three schools to carry out their master's theses.
Elen Lotman
BFM
2016
