Ladj Ly and the students of Kourtrajmé Dakar, January 19, 2022. Credits: SEYLLOU / AFP
Famous among the apprentice filmmakers, the Kourtrajmé film school led by the cineastes Toumani Sangré and Ladj Ly, director of Misérables, opened the doors of a new establishment in Dakar, Senegal on the 19th of January 2022. Financed by the French Development Agency (Agence Française de Développement – AFD), which supports the audiovisual and cinema dynamics in Senegal, this project aims at contributing to the development of technical infrastructures, training, and improvement of both capabilities and workers’ professionalization.
Therefore, Kourtrajmé school offers two initial trainings in “Screenplay” and “Direction”, two training courses for the audiovisual and film professions, completely free of charge and open to all without any diploma requirement. The school is set out to eventually welcome about 40 students per year (20 students per promotion).
Based on its expertize in training and its expertize with the alpha class (orientation and pre-qualification course/training for the audiovisual and digital media professions created in 2019 for the 17-25 years old, without any diploma requirement), the INA supports the project for a 3-year partnership.
At first, the INA will give its advice in educational engineering for the creation and the set-up of the trainings and their certification, as well as the training of Senegalese trainers in order to perpetuate the transmission of knowledge.
A first INA training mission has followed the trainers with remote monitoring, supporting the launching of the 2022 promotion in Writing. Another mission will take place in Dakar in May for the Direction’s promotion. A remote monitoring for the trainers is expected throughout the 3 years.
Three questions for Jean-Claude Mocik, educational engineering at INA, in charge of accompanying the Dakar Kourtrajmé School
What is your role in this project?
First, my role has been to understand the expectations and the needs in terms of pedagogy in order to build a project with the Dakar team, for the Kourtrajmé school’s audiences are very specific and peculiar. We have to take into consideration the gender-equality within the promotion “Scenario”. There are as many women as men. It is very interesting because it’s extremely rare.
In what areas do you support the school?
I provide methodology, pedagogy in regards to the welcoming and the follow-up of students, I also bring a co-constructive outlook on their pedagogic scenario, which covers the 21-week long training. For example, I have suggested starting off from the student corpus, from what nourishes the students to bring them to dramaturgic mechanisms, rather than imposing them block building pedagogy. The aim is for the group to improve and for it to be of high quality. For that, we rely upon participant’s potential and fragilities. When training writers, the question that always comes back is: should we cultivate audacity, originality or whether we should implement the necessary mechanisms in order to create more conventional structures. At last, we have pondered upon evaluation and accreditation of learning criteria together with Kourtrajmé’s school.
How has the opening been going?
Unfortunately, I was not able to move due to the Covid19 outbreak, which has been very restrictive, I have not had the chance to meet the students yet. In this context, we organized 8 training sessions from home. I will visit them in Dakar in a few weeks to follow the project and pursue this training with the “Direction” team.