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The Seville Festival is creating Filmlovers of the Future, a competitive section for adolescents differentiated from the Europa Junior children’s section

The Seville Festival, committed to the education of audiences and the work of stimulating the public through film experience, is expanding its educational and media literacy programme in 2017 with the creation of the Filmlovers of the Future section.

This new competitive section arises from the need to attend to an adolescent public with their own discourses and interests. It brings together films that previously were grouped with others which were child oriented in the Europa Junior section, as well as some titles appropriate for audiences from 12 to 19 which are also participating in the New Waves section at the Seville Festival. So a dozen films having their national premiere will come together under the title Filmlovers of the Future, with the aim of drawing young people to the cinema as a means of expression and a way of explaining what is around them. The films and their directors, whom they will meet at presentations and debates, will introduce them to a cinema different from what they’re used to, that they understand and that talks about them.

Several films in Filmlovers of the Future tackle education in the classrooms as a setting in which to talk about young people’s problems. The educational models and teachers who are involved in the lives of their pupils are the protagonists of films like Orchestra Class by Rachid Hami starring Kad Merad (The Chorus, Welcome to the Sticks) where education is an instrument for personal rehabilitation and music is the medium for channeling the pupils’ potential. With a documentary aspect, we go into the integrated classrooms of Children of Chance by Thierry Michel & Pascal Colson, or into those which prepare youngsters from disadvantaged surroundings to face the world through an oratory competition as happens in Speak up by Stéphane de Freitas & Ladj Ly.

The filmlovers of the future will discover how a timid young man from Manchester who listened to the New York Dolls and read Oscar Wilde became Morrisey, the legendary, intelligent, unclassifiable singer of the Smiths, in the biopic England is Mine by Mark Gill; and they will learn of the adventures, sexual awakenings and life lessons of the young people in The War of Bumpkins by Davide Barletti and Lorenzo Conte. The lives of young protagonists when faced with hostile environments and the world of adults are central plots in films like the British drama in the form of dystopia The White King by Alex Helfrecht and Jörg Tittel, the drama about directionless lives in Mobile Homes by Vladimir de Fontenay or the winner of the Audience Award at the Edinburgh Festival Just Charlie by Rebekah Fortune¸ which looks at the conflict of gender identity at an early age with football as the background. This selection is completed with Mrs. Hyde by Serge Bozon, an irreverent comedy which is also participating in The New Waves and stars Isabelle Huppert, in a revision of the classic of fantasy literature created by Robert Louis Stevenson.

The films will be screened in the Cine Zona Este and the Lope de Vega Theatre, in original version with subtitles, and it is the young spectators who, through their votes, will choose the winning film in each of the sections. The Europa Junior section, for audiences from 3 to 12 years of age, which we will announce shortly, and the Filmlovers of the Future section will bring over 20,000 children and adolescents to the cinemas to experience at first hand a European cinema that is aimed at them. In these sessions arranged with the city’s educational centres, the festival has the support of the Territorial Delegation for Educational Planning and the Education Service of the Department of Education, Civil Participation and Municipal Buildings of Seville City Council which will also offer 180 free workshops for education in audiovisual matters. The workshops will be held in the educational centres, between one and two weeks before the start of the festival as satellite complementary activities to Europa Junior and also to Filmlovers of the Future. These activities will continue for several weeks after the Seville Festival ends. The activity in 2017 will be available to over 5,000 pupils.

However the festival will go further in its involvement with the young audience. Today training begins for the third generation of the festival’s Young Programmers, an initiative through which a dozen secondary and university students learn to analyse films and get to know the festival from within, choosing one of the films that will form part of the competitive section The New Waves. For the third consecutive year the Seville Festival and the association A Bao A Qu (responsible for the programme ‘Cine en curso’, and which already collaborates with organizations such as the CCCB, the Film Archive of Catalonia, MACBA, el CGAI or the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía) set up this initiative as part of the European programme Moving Cinema. The participants, guided by specialized teachers, will have to work in a team and discuss what they have seen, thus gaining practice and knowledge in film programming. Last year the festival’s Young Programmers selected the film Daydreams by Caroline Deruas to be included in the festival’s programme.