Presentation of National Film School of Denmark

On the occasion of the Danish Film School Retrospective at the 8th ZagrebDox, primarily consisting of graduation works of the leading Danish documentarists of today, Arne Bro, the selector of the Retrospective and Torben Simonsen, member of ZagrebDox Young Jury, will present this prestigious school in the Festival Center on Friday at 5pm.

The National Film School of Denmark is an elite education under The Ministry of Culture, and thereby defined as an art school. This Film School is trying to defend the experience of the hand, the eye and the voice itself, doubting the fundamental properties of theory. Yet trying to develop relevant theorems, based on experience with the daily life language and the continuous work with films, produced on professional equipment, under modern, industrial conditions.

The documentary education accepts 6 documentary directors and 3 multi camera directors in each generation. Applicants will meet a harsh process of application forms, including questions on philosophy, analysis on media and personal motives, interviews conducted by highly placed decision makers and film artists, a demand of 2 film or television works. Finally applicants will be confronted with a practical examination and test over 3 days, where the few applicants left from earlier steps, will be asked to perform all aspects of film and television production. The hereafter accepted documentary elite group is named ‘The Television Department’, observing the lack of financial power and alternative distribution of documentary works outside broadcasters in Denmark.

The term ‘television’ provides the prejudice among students and in the television industry, that documentary works might be financed, produced and distributed throughout both public service and commercial TV channels. This prejudice includes the idea that the public might profit from insight in society through a pictorial language, which doesn’t demand academic background. Trying to express human experiences and feelings found in the complex and amorf reality. Given order and formed into language by the subjective view of an artist. Trying to allow sensations and observations, its own reflections on the seen, to establish the ruling fundament of a language, a point of view.

The Television Department is parted in two collaborating lines: One of documentary directors, focused on the study of the many layered reality in the field. The other of multi camera directors, focused on the heavy equipped study of isolated realities in artificial rooms. Both lines are understanding the studio as a studying space, with its formal demands for composition and form, risen from the aesthetic rules and from the very existence of a crew, a park of lamps etc. The main term is investigation, the main method is experiment, the main result a pile of attractive faults, leading the student to recognize aesthetic laws, belonging to tradition and the subtle laws of expression, belonging to them selves.

The purpose is to develop subjective and original documentary directors, maybe not quite socialized, but sensuous human beings, able to express and perform personal observations and reflections, motives and strategies, offering fairness and storytelling craftsmanship to the public, the hereby enlightened democratic society. The education program is divided into an industrial and an artistic curriculum. The aim is to produce a flexible, multi methodical language and working habit, giving the student ability to work artistically in industrial surroundings, using knowledge of adequate technologies, social behavior, conditions and terminology in order to be precise, both in the economic organizational sense and in the storytelling technical sense.

The student will meet exercises, training working methods, concepts and terminology as in an industrial environment, as they will meet exercises training working methods, genres and existential questions as in a painting, writing or performing surrounding. This program leads to film works dealing with lovers, families and other personal motives of the artist, like we see it in poetry, music and painting. It also leads to film works dealing with mainstream themes and subjects from the life in our society, like we see it in actual television.

Arne Bro
Head of The Television Department and National Film School of Denmark Program Selector