Just spent an intensely productive workshop week with a lovely team of aspiring young film journalists, photographers and filmmakers from Estonia, France and the UK at the wonderful Encounters Film Festival at Watershed and Arnolfini.

This was the second time this workshop has run at Encounters and I was involved last year too, but on this occasion we had added Europeans – thanks to a Youth in Action grant! Their mission was to cover all aspects of the Festival, from their own perspectives, through the production of 3 ‘dailies’ and a blog, all in English – I have huge admiration for the French and Estonian participants whose use of written English was astonishing. My role as workshop co-ordinator was to guide them through the process having taken the baton for this from Encounters’ Jude Lister who got the grant, set up the workshop and got designers and printers on board.

Six long days of challenging deadlines, thousands of words to write and read, linguistic oddities to reinterpret (not many but it makes you hear anew our odd English idioms that it’s too easy to take for granted), gigabytes of photos and films to edit, but such great results and so many fascinating conversations and exchanges of ideas across language boundaries; everyone seemed to enjoy the entire experience!

These are the shiny dailies (thanks Smith and Milton for your great layouts and patience!) containing some excellent writing on all things Encounters, plus additional articles on the blog that also includes a few short films and beautiful photos made by the team. We’ll be planning for the next one soon – and that will be Encounters’ 20th anniversary.