Teaching European cinema: the European University Film Award (EUFA) project – dossier

Abstract

The “Teaching European Cinema” dossier has grown out of the European University Film Award (EUFA) project that was initiated in 2016 by Filmfest Hamburg in collaboration with the European Film Academy (EFA) and the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS). In its second edition in 2017, the EUFA connected twenty European universities in a common teaching project in which five nominated films were analysed and discussed in courses of the respective universities. Subsequently, one student representative per country joined the three-day student jury deliberation in Hamburg and voted for the final EUFA winner. In 2016, Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake (2016) won the inaugural EUFA; in 2017, Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s Heartstone (Hjartasteinn, 2016) was awarded the prize. The dossier works on different levels: first, it aims to present the EUFA project to a wider public; second, it promotes an exchange among the participating colleagues; and third, it operates as a teaching dossier for scholars within the wider field of European film and media studies to discuss questions of how best to teach contemporary European cinema.