Speakers' Avenue (2019-)
One of the projects inspired by SWPS Film Lab was the development of a film education collective called Speakers’ Avenue, which was founded by Grzegorz Pamrów, previously my student and then a colleague employed by SWPS, who co-operated with me on running SWPS Film Lab. Speakers’ Avenue specializes in developing experimental and often interdisciplinary courses directed at film professionals, other creative industries as well as general public.
I got engaged in the activity of this collective, where I lecture on storytelling and consult projects which are developed during their programme for film directors.
SWPS Film Lab (2010-2014)
SWPS Film Lab was an experimental educational centre which was run in co-operation with Munk Film Studio. Its main activity was a series of meetings during which groups of students and staff members of various university faculties consulted film projects developed in the Studio, both at their screenwriting stage and during editing and post-production. The consultants were associated with different fields of humanities and social sciences, including psychology, sociology, cultural studies, law, journalism, literature and language. A number of feature films and short films produced in the ‘30 minutes’ programme were consulted in this way.
SWPS Film Lab inspired other film initiatives, including workshops for film professionals and attempts to create a film think tank for the Polish film industry.
Warsaw University and SWPS University (1996-2014)
A large number of my academic courses concerned film, for example, American film genres, various aspects of film history and film theory, specially film narration, selected elements of classic cinema, particularly the cinema of Charles Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock, auteur cinema and development of film projects. Sometimes I also dealt with subjects outside the realm of film, such as theory of culture, theory of translation, and history of Great Britain and Poland. Besides, I supervised a number of BA and MA theses covering a wide spectrum of topics about film and other phenomena of culture.