Sharing film with your class

Film is an inclusive medium by virtue of its rich variety of visual and auditory content. However, it can sometimes be difficult to source and screen film content and to ascertain what content may be most useful and suitable, especially if you’re teaching from home!

Sourcing film content

Into Film has several thousand full length and short film titles in its catalogue, available for free to any state-run UK school that starts a film club. Once you have signed up for your club, you will be sent DVDs that can be screened in class or after school.

Into Film will also be launching a streaming service towards the end of 2020, enabling schools to stream titles directly from the website to their clubs.

If you are using feature length content for literacy, it can be useful to break it into manageable sections to discuss and analyse. A simple way of finding tailored feature length content is by visiting the Into Film website, where there is a range of resources containing film clips that can be downloaded by visiting our resources page.

Advantages of short films

Throughout this course, we’ll be focusing on using clips from short films as the bedrock of Literacy activities. Short films are ideal to use in literacy work where the narrative structure underpins the learning:

• Short films can usually be screened in their entirety within one lesson
• The short running times make repeated viewings possible so pupils can acquire detailed familiarity with the work
• Short films, like short stories, are not necessarily governed by the same conventions as their longer counterparts
• A short film can offer a manageable and stimulating resource to develop core skills
• For the majority of short films, pupils are not already familiar with their content.

Screening films

Clips from a range of short films are featured in this course and, in each case, the full film is available for you to use in class or online, using the screen sharing function available on most video conferencing platforms. We’ve created a Vimeo playlist for users of this course, which you can access using the password: TeachLiteracy

Throughout this course the film content selected has been deemed as suitable for use within a primary setting (by a panel of young people and their teachers) but we recommend you watch each film in full before using in class to ascertain suitability for your cohort of students.