Around 110 cinemas throughout North Rhine-Westphalia will be opening their doors for the NRW School Cinema Weeks until February 8th, and more than 110,000 schoolchildren and teachers will be taking part in the state’s largest film education project. Around 4,000 performances take place in the movie theaters in 79 cities, from Aachen to Wuppertal, all accompanied by free teaching material for preparation and follow-up at school. The NRW School Cinema Weeks are organized by “Vision Cinema – Network for Film and Media Competence” and “Film+School NRW”, a joint initiative of the Regional Association of Westphalia-Lippe (LWL) and the NRW Ministry of Education.
The NRW School Cinema Weeks were officially opened on Thursday (January 26) in the Steinfurt cinema with a special highlight: the turbulent comedy “Lucy is now a gangster” was shown before the regular theatrical release. Director Till Endemann and the actresses Valerie and Violetta Arnemann, who share the leading role of Lucy, traveled to the opening and spoke to the Steinfurt students about the film. Endemann also underscored the importance of school performances for his work: “It was a special moment to experience the reactions of the students to the film directly, to answer the questions afterwards and to see what moves the children. In my opinion, the right and I am only too happy to support the important use of the medium of film in school discourse.”
Almost 90 feature, animated and documentary films related to many teaching topics are on the program of the NRW School Cinema Weeks, some of them in the original version for foreign language lessons or with accompanying film discussions. For this purpose, various filmmakers from the director to the costume designer are guests at selected performances, as well as experienced media educators and experts on space travel, who enrich this year’s topic of the Science Year entitled “Our Universe” with a lot of background information . Further training in film analysis in the classroom and a film criticism competition from spinxx.de, the online magazine for young media critics, in which prizes can be won for the entire school class, complete the NRW school cinema weeks.
School classes can still register for many performances. The reduced admission price for the cinema screenings is 4 euros, teachers and accompanying persons have free admission. All information about the program as well as online registration can be found on the Internet at http://www.schulkinowochen.nrw.de. The project team at the LWL media center for Westphalia is also available for personal advice on the hotline 0251-591-3055.
background
The School Cinema Weeks NRW are organized by “Film+Schule NRW” and “Vision Kino”, a nationwide, non-profit organization for the promotion of film and media skills in children and young people. It is supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the Film Promotion Agency, the Deutsche Kinemathek Foundation and the “Kino macht Schule” GbR, consisting of the Association of Film Distributors, the HDF Kino eV, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Kino – Gilde deutscher Filmkunsttheater eV and the Federal Association of Municipal Film Work eV Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has taken over the patronage of “Vision Kino”. Cooperation partners of the NRW School Cinema Weeks are the NRW Ministry of Education, the NRW Ministry of Culture, the municipal media centers in NRW, the Federal Agency for Civic Education, Engagement Global, the Science Year and spinxx.de, the online portal for young media criticism.
