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Truly Free Film

Advancing Film Education, Media Literacy, & the Educational Market For Film

Let's shoot!By Joanne Parsont

In a world saturated with screens and immersed in media, it is not just advisable to teach young people about film, it’s imperative. We all recognize the power of film to both inform and transform, and what better place to make that happen than inside a classroom (or inside a theater full of kids), where students are primed to be enlightened and inspired? As young people have become round-the-clock media consumers and creators, it has become that much more important for teachers to use media effectively in the classroom, for filmmakers to learn how to talk about their work in an educational context, and for students to be exposed to media professionals.

At the San Francisco Film Society, we’ve been working in the educational community for more than two decades, and it is some of the most gratifying work we do. As we’ve steadily built up our Education programs over the last few years, we’ve been trying to find a way to share that work—and the experience and resources we’ve cultivated—with the greater film and education communities outside the local Bay Area. So we are really excited about the great new web portal we just launched: FilmEd.

FilmEd. is

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Truly Free Film

A Word On The Educational Market

Jon Reiss guests blogs again:

At the recent FIND conference on the state of independent film, I had the pleasure to meet Robert Bahar who made the wonderful Emmy Winning documentary Made in L.A. We were discussing the problem of releasing a film on DVD prior to or simultaneously with an educational release

I have learned since the release of Bomb It that it is traditionally difficult to have an educational release after or concurrent with a DVD release. This is because educational institutions will eagerly buy your dvd from Amazon for 19.95 rather than pay the educational rate of $195. 
Robert told me about his ingeneous solution which was to put a notice at the beginning of the film – similar to the FBI warning – that the film was for home use only and not for educational or public performance. In the authoring they disabled the ability for people to pause for a few minutes after this message or fast forward through it. Eg any teacher would have to play this warning – indicating to students that it was being shown illegally. Pretty smart!

Robert is smart in another way in terms of his film. He has set up with his fulfillment company (the wonderful Neoflix) to provide various community screening packages for sale on his site for various size screenings. Check out his site to see how he has set this up. Make sure to check out his amazing “Event Planning Toolkit”.

Let us know what you think of what he is doing.

You can also respond directly to Jon at: 

jon@jonreiss.com