NORD film school co-operation ends at film festival

Since the birth of NORD – New Nordic Voices in 2022, film school students from Denmark, Norway and Sweden have been working together to cultivate and strengthen a network across national borders. During the Göteborg Film Festival, starting 24 January, the students will finally be able to present the projects they have worked on along the way. 

Maria Hedman Hvitfeldt, Head of Department at SKH, says that the project has resulted in a recurring course for film students in their final year of study:

- For our alumni who have participated in the project, NORD has created a sense of belonging to a larger and thus stronger alumni network than previous generations had. For SKH and the subject area for film and media, it has also provided a context and stable basis for future collaboration. The project has now been developed and expanded - more schools are coming together in a joint, recurring, Nordic course aimed at final-year students, Entering the Industry. The new course is now starting at the Gothenburg Film Festival as a pilot, and is then intended to be given every year to end with a project presentation at the said festival. The course is coordinated within NORDICIL, NORDIC FILM SCHOOLS, in collaboration with the Göteborg Film Festival and Film i Väst and is intended for programme students. 

Jörgen Bergmark, Assistant Professor of Script Writing at SKH, describes how valuable it was on several levels, not least with the co-operation between the teachers:

- Apart from the fact that it was interesting to see how the students from the different programmes approached each other, there was also great value in working together with teachers from the same schools. There was a parallel effect that might not have been anticipated: that NORD also became a Nordic co-operation project on an educational level. We teachers created the programme together and implemented it together, so now there is an established cooperation at teacher level.

On the website of the National Film School of Denmark you can read two interviews about the collaboration. One is with teachers Lilja Ingolfsdottir and Josefine Kirkeskov, who talk about what they think is particularly valuable about Nordic co-operation. Lilja is a teacher in the screenwriting programme at the Norwegian Film School and is currently working on her feature film debut ‘Lovable’, and has been involved in NORD since the project started. Josefine teaches directing at the National Film School of Denmark and has been part of the project for a year. Both will prepare their students for the pitch round at the Göteborg Film Festival in January.
The teacher interview

In the interview with the three students Nawa Alani from the National Film School of Denmark, Yousra Said from Stockholm University of the Arts and Ingvild Dahlgren from the Norwegian Film School, we learn that although a pitch round in front of an international industry audience can make anyone nervous, it has never been the core of NORD. They have been involved since the beginning of the NORD project, and here you can read about their takeaways as the project comes to an end.
The student interview 

See also Göteborg Film Festivals webbsite about NORD.