Participants in the Youth Jury are teenagers from several Bucharest high schools. They will be watching nine documentaries from the One World Romania program, and, in the end, they will only choose one that will receive the festival trophy, and will be announced at the closing ceremony on the evening of the 12th of April and shown on the last day of the festival, the 13th of April.

However, the decision will be made following a complex learning process. On the first day, the teenagers will take part in an interactive course in media education, taught by Nicoleta Fotiade, from Mediawise Society, and Ionuț Mareș. Together, they will have discussions and learn new notions about human rights, civic participation and media education (representation and visual language, viewing context, interpretation of media messaging etc.), and basic concepts that will help them identify and decipher the particularities of an auteur documentary (arthouse). Then, during the festival, the films will be discussed in detail over three meetings, with the guidance of the two tutors. Starting from the ideas and concepts learned during the first course, the debates will focus both on the subject matter and themes from the nine films and on the specific elements of cinematic language used in documentary films. The Youth Jury’s winning film will be chosen after the final deliberation, when all participants will have to also write a motivation for their option. 

The program’s objective is to acquaint these teenagers with the experience of watching a documentary in the specific setting of a film festival (some showings will be followed by open discussions with the filmmakers and the guest experts), to expose them to as many different forms of non-fictional cinema as possible, to stimulate and develop their visual perception, critical thinking and their ability to debate and reason; to help them better understand the way in which documentary film can be seen both for the aesthetic pleasure it can produce, and for the introspection on the surrounding world that it can trigger. 

Nicoleta Fotiade is an expert trainer in media education and digital culture. She has taught media education at The National University in Bucharest, she trains professors and librarians on how to integrate media education in their communities. She thinks media education should start as young as possible. She’s the founder and president of Mediawise Society and International Association for Media Education (IAME.education). 

Ionuț Mareș is a journalist and film critic. His articles can be found on Films in Frame. He is the artistic director of festivals Ceau, Cinema! (Timișoara), Nordic Festival (București) and Zilele Filmului Românesc in Chișinău, and the programmer for the short film competition of the Anonimul Festival (Sfântu Gheorghe).