Academy of Moving People & Images (AMPI)

Academy of Moving People and Images is a platform in Helsinki for mobile people—those who have arrived in Finland for different reasons, be they immigrants, asylum seekers, students, or employees. We started this project at the beginning of 2019 with a working group of 16 people, with the support of the Kone Foundation. I worked there full-time as the curator and producer of the project.

We aimed to design a new learning model and a sustainable pedagogical platform where people who have arrived in Finland from different backgrounds get to contribute to the film industry and initiate change. Within the Academy, we explored what it means to decolonize knowledge, education, and institutions to challenge white European knowledge’s hegemony without a top-down approach. We aimed to eliminate bureaucratic processes, dismiss hierarchy, and create a space where everyone could express their knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits without the concern of being subjected to discriminatory or patronizing behavior. The diversity among the community of the Academy is enlightening, as they exchange ideas and experiences to confront multiple power structures of domination that continue to exist not only in the film industry but in classrooms, research, language, ideas, history, and institutions, among others. The theoretical and epistemic knowledge of the Academy will have a lived dimension to it—‘lived’ in the sense that it foregrounds the experiences of those who have been excluded from modernist knowledge production. I wanted AMPI participants to be able to write any story they wanted, from horror films to comedy dramas. My emphasis was on teaching and encouraging the participants to recognize the misrepresentation of minorities and marginalized people in their society and to be critical of stereotyping, exotification, vilification, and other forms of othering in the film industry. In doing so, we made a conscious effort to distance ourselves from collaborations with individuals or institutions whose values do not match ours, whether in theory or praxis.

This definition was altered in 2021, but I chose to quote the older definition as it was used during my time on the project. And in this case, I’d like to introduce the project as it was in 2019–2020 rather than as it is now. AMPI’s idea was to provide one year of hands-on, fee-free courses for 12 participants. The programme included various workshops in which the participants acquired and exchanged knowledge about the various filmmaking tools, such as directing, scriptwriting, editing, lighting & cinematography, acting, producing, sound recording & editing, and film & critical theories. The participants would also get familiar with how to work within the local film industry, how to network, how to apply for grants, etc. After attending around 300 hours of different workshops and finishing their scripts, the participants would go through a preliminary pre-production stage where they would go through casting, location scouting, and other necessary steps to prepare for the production. After that, each participant made their own short films under the guidance of film industry professionals. The participants were expected to rotate through all the essential roles required to complete their films. So, after the production of all the films, each participant would have experienced seven roles within film production: director, first assistant director, cinematographer, focus puller, gaffer, sound recordist, and line producer. In post-production, the participants would edit their films’ sound and images with their lecturers’ help. Our goal was for the films to be presented at local and international film festivals.

Academy of Moving People and Images did not have a space of its own; it operated within the space of its many collaborators, such as Goethe Institut Finnland, G.A.P, HIAP, Design Museum Helsinki, The Finnish Film Foundation (SES), Museum of Impossible Forms, Taidekoulu MAA, Caisa, and Publics. Apart from saving a great deal of the costs that renting a space would require, the idea was for the participants to get to know the Finnish art and film scene and surround themselves with a creative network through this constant mobility.

The academy would provide wider professional support and access to resources and the community, encouraging participants to learn through practice. All the lecturers would offer the students practical and theoretical support to enhance and realize their individual projects. The focus of the Academy was on narrative films. However, there would be lectures on documentary films as well. Through our theoretical lectures, our participants would acquire a postcolonial and feminist approach to feminist theories.