Australian Film, Television and Radio School
Australia
This Sydney school, located alongside the city’s main studio complex in Moore Park, runs industry-based programs across every screen and sound craft, and its graduates range from Oscar-winning author Jane Campion (Piano) And Golden Camera winner Warwick Thornton (Samson and Delilah) by Oscar-winning cinematographer Dion Beebe (Memoirs of a Geisha).
Beijing Film Academy
China
The Beijing Film Academy awards degrees through doctorates. level across directing, acting, cinematography and animation, and in recent years has opened a sprawling new campus in the Huairou district of northern Beijing – six times the size of the old Haidian House, with eight cinemas and five sound halls.
Cinema Experience Center
Italy
Europe’s oldest film school runs a network of specialized universities across Italy, offering extensive training not only in directing, screenwriting, production and acting, but also in craft fields such as visual effects, restoration and sound. CSC Immersive Arts, a recent addition on Venice’s San Servolo Island, focuses on virtual and augmented reality storytelling.
ECAM
Spain
Designed to serve as a pipeline to fuel the thriving Spanish film and television business, ECAM places an intense focus on connecting students with employment opportunities after graduation. It is the only film school to have its own co-production market, the ECAM Forum, held in June just after Cannes.
Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific
Spain
ESCAC is based in Terrassa, just north of Barcelona, and offers a range of courses from screenwriting and production to sound design and a bilingual stunt academy. With long-standing relationships with Pedro Almodóvar’s production company El Deseo and Spain’s audiovisual boom in full swing, ESC’s “challenge-based learning” approach achieves a graduate employment rate of up to 92 percent.
Goblins, L’ÉCOLE DE L’IMAGE
France
The Gobelins School of Visual Arts in Paris is regularly ranked as the best animation school in the world. It’s easy to see why. It combines rigorous artistic training, studio-style production methods, and an unusually close relationship with the animation industry – the Gobelins have just announced a new partnership with Guillermo del Toro and Netflix to create a stop-motion studio at the school.
HFF Munich
Germany
HFF’s impressive list of alumni includes directors Wim Wenders (Perfect days), Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (The lives of others), Roland Emmerich (independence day(And Tim Felbaum)September 5). The school offers study programs in directing, producing, screenwriting, cinematography, documentary filmmaking and visual effects.
Korean Academy of Film Arts
Korea
This elite academy maintains small classes—about 30 students a year—with extensive training in directing, cinematography, production, and animation, as well as a feature program, launched in 2006, that produces about seven student films a year, many of which find their way into festivals from Busan to Berlin.
No femis
France
This Paris-based academy accepts less than 5% of applicants each year, with only a few places available in the directing, producing and screenwriting tracks. The grueling admissions process was depicted in director Claire Simon’s 2016 documentary Graduation (Le Concourse), which follows candidates through a series of written, practical, and oral tests where faculty discuss each applicant’s strengths and weaknesses in comprehensive detail.
London Film School
UK
LFS is now a truly global operation, with 80 percent of its students coming from outside the UK and has a reputation for attracting leading figures in the international art house scene, including pioneering Hong Kong New Wave director Ann Hui (Simple life), Berlin Golden Bear winner Carla Simon (The Karas) and South African director Oliver Hermanus (History of sound).
National Film and Television School
UK
NFTS has been best-in-class at translating education into industry jobs, with a graduate employment rate of more than 90 percent. The organization runs more behind-the-camera courses than any other film school in the world, giving students the opportunity to get hands-on experience in everything from directing and cinematography to production accounting and script supervision.
Tokyo University of the Arts
Japan
Tokyo University of the Arts launched the Graduate School of Film and New Media in 2005, and the Yokohama-based program has since become a hotbed for Japanese film and anime industry. This program is production-based and deliberately interdisciplinary, bringing student directors, animators, and composers together to work on the same projects.
Toronto Film School
Canada
TFS unveiled a new campus in downtown Toronto in June, featuring five flexible studio spaces, two sound booths, a makeup room, a sound mixing room, six hybrid classrooms, and a video game design and animation program that includes a new motion capture stage.
Universidad del Cinema
Argentina
Founded in 1991 by acclaimed director Manuel Antin, the University of Cinema of Buenos Aires has become a leading film school in Latin America, playing a pivotal role in the emergence of New Argentine Cinema and the success of arthouses in the region. Alumni filmmakers include Oscar-nominated director Damian Szifron (Wild tales), Pablo Trapero (The clan), Cannes players Lisandro Alonso, Anna Katz and Felipe Galvez Haberli (The settlers). The school offers undergraduate degrees in directing, producing, screenwriting, animation, and other majors. Applicants from non-Spanish-speaking countries must demonstrate proficiency in the Spanish language.
Vancouver Film School
Canada
A Canadian West Coast film school near Los Angeles has drawn more American and international students by launching a one-year, hybrid, focused program that combines on-campus training with online production-focused training. VFS graduates also get early jobs on major Hollywood projects filmed in and around Vancouver, and students leave the school prepared for long careers in film, television, gaming and animation.
Victoria University of Wellington
New Zealand
New Zealand’s capital is actually a company town – the company is owned by Peter Jackson – and Victoria University of Wellington, known in the Maori language as Te Hiringa Waka, is located right in its heart. Since 2017, the university’s Miramar Creative Center has integrated students into the suburb that houses the Director’s Screen Empire: the purpose-built facility, developed with the Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings Miramar Creative Ltd. is equipped with… Editor Jamie Selkirk features industry-standard motion capture cameras, green screens and post sets, and draws educational support from Jackson’s Weta Workshop, Weta FX and Park Road Post Production right next door.
Patrick Brzeski, Lily Ford, Scott Roxborough and Eitan Flesing contributed to this report.
This story appeared in the July 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
