Film Educators’ Team (ZEF) and film education in Poland: Successes and Challenges

Karol Szafraniec will briefly outline the structure of film education in Poland. He will discuss how large, national film education programmes operate, as well as how local ones function; how cinemas are involved in them; how they acquire films for distribution; and what role ZEF plays. It coordinates and brings together film educators whilst also developing a film recommendation system for educational purposes that may be useful for all groups involved in film education, namely teachers, cinema operators and parents. He will also discuss the rating system, which does not currently exist in Poland and which ZEF is endeavouring to introduce.

Workshop is part of the project Visegrad Audiovisual LAB. The project is co-financed by the governments of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia through Visegrad grants from the International Visegrad Fund. The fund’s mission is to support the principles of sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.

Karol Szafraniec is a cultural studies scholar and film expert, a curator of multidisciplinary cultural projects active throughout Poland, and a podcaster. An award-winning educator and film speaker with twenty years’ experience. He is the co-author of the educational book ABC of Polish Culture (2020), and is a member of the Film Educators’ Team (ZEF), where he assesses films from an educational perspective and co-hosts an educational podcast. He is a selector for the international short film competition at the “Animator” festival in Poznań. He has given guest lectures on sound in Polish cinema at FAMU, and from November he will be teaching students at the Łódź Film School in Poland.