AUSTRALIAN FILM TELEVISION AND RADIO SCHOOL
AUSTRALIA
This Sydney school, situated beside the city’s major studio complex at Moore Park, runs industry-driven programs across every screen and audio craft, and its alumni range from Oscar-winning auteur Jane Campion (The Piano) and Camera d’Or winner Warwick Thornton (Samson and Delilah) to Oscar-winning cinematographer Dion Beebe (Memoirs of a Geisha).
BEIJING FILM ACADEMY
CHINA
The Beijing Film Academy grants degrees through the Ph.D. level across directing, acting, cinematography and animation, and in recent years it opened a sprawling new campus in Beijing’s northern Huairou District — six times the size of its longtime Haidian home, with eight cinemas and five soundstages.
CENTRO SPERIMENTALE DI CINEMATOGRAFIA
ITALY
Europe’s oldest film school operates a network of specialized campuses throughout Italy, offering intensive training not only in directing, screenwriting, producing and acting but also in such crafts as visual effects, restoration and sound. A recent addition on Venice’s island of San Servolo, the CSC Immersive Arts hub focuses on virtual and augmented reality storytelling.
ECAM
SPAIN
Designed to be a pipeline to feed the booming Spanish film and TV business, ECAM is laser-focused on connecting students with job 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.
ESCAC
SPAIN
Based in Terrassa, just north of Barcelona, ESCAC offers a range of courses from screenwriting and production to sound design and a bilingual stunt academy. With long-running ties to Pedro Almodóvar’s El Deseo production company and Spain’s audiovisual boom in full swing, ESCAC’s “challenge-based learning” approach boasts a 92 percent graduate employment rate.
GOBELINS, L’ÉCOLE DE L’IMAGE
FRANCE
Paris’ Gobelins visual arts school is regularly ranked the top animation school in the world. It’s easy to see why. It combines rigorous artistic training, studio-style production methods and unusually close ties to the animation industry — Gobelins 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 Fehlbaum (September 5). The school offers degree programs in directing, producing, screenwriting, cinematography, documentary filmmaking and visual effects.
KOREAN ACADEMY OF FILM ARTS
KOREA
This elite academy keeps classes small — around 30 students a year — with intensive training in directing, cinematography, producing and animation, plus a feature program, launched in 2006, that turns out about seven student films a year, many of which find their way to festivals from Busan to Berlin.
LA FÉMIS
FRANCE
This Paris-based academy accepts less than 5 percent of applicants each year, with just a handful of places available across its directing, producing and screenwriting tracks. The notoriously grueling admissions process was captured in filmmaker Claire Simon’s 2016 documentary The Graduation (Le Concours), which follows candidates through a series of written, practical and oral examinations as faculty members debate every applicant’s strengths and weaknesses in exhaustive detail.
LONDON FILM SCHOOL
U.K.
LFS is now a truly global operation, with 80 percent of its students from outside the U.K. and a reputation for minting leading figures in the international art house scene, including pioneering Hong Kong new wave director Ann Hui (A Simple Life), Spanish Berlin Golden Bear winner Carla Simón (Alcarràs) and South African filmmaker Oliver Hermanus (The History of Sound).
NATIONAL FILM AND TELEVISION SCHOOL
U.K.
The NFTS has been best in class in translating education into industry jobs, with a graduate employment rate of more than 90 percent. The institution runs more behind-the-camera courses than any other film school in the world, giving students a chance 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 its Graduate School of Film and New Media in 2005, and the Yokohama-based program has since served as a hotbed for Japanese art house filmmaking and anime. Production-driven and deliberately cross-disciplinary, it puts student directors, animators and composers together to work on the same projects.
TORONTO FILM SCHOOL
CANADA
TFS unveiled a new downtown Toronto campus in June, with five flexible studio spaces, two sound booths, a makeup room, a sound mixing room and six hybrid classrooms, and a video game design and animation program that has a brand new motion-capture stage.
UNIVERSIDAD DEL CINE
ARGENTINA
Founded in 1991 by acclaimed filmmaker Manuel Antín, Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires has become a premier Latin American film school, playing a pivotal role in the rise of the New Argentine Cinema and the region’s art house success. Filmmaker alumni include Oscar-nominated director Damián Szifron (Wild Tales), Pablo Trapero (The Clan), Cannes regular Lisandro Alonso, Ana Katz and Felipe Gálvez Haberle (The Settlers). The school offers undergraduate degrees in directing, producing, screenwriting, animation and other disciplines. Applicants from non-Spanish-speaking countries must demonstrate Spanish proficiency.
VANCOUVER FILM SCHOOL
CANADA
The Canadian West Coast film school with close proximity to Los Angeles has made a push for more American and international students by launching a hybrid and concentrated one-year program that combines on-campus and online production-focused training. VFS graduates also gain early jobs on major Hollywood projects shooting in and around Vancouver, and students leave the school ready for long careers in film, television, gaming and animation.
Vancouver Film School
Courtesy of School
VICTORIA UNIVERSITY OF WELLINGTON
NEW ZEALAND
New Zealand’s capital is effectively a company town — the company being Peter Jackson’s — and Victoria University of Wellington, known in Maori as Te Herenga Waka, sits squarely at the heart of it. Since 2017, the university’s Miramar Creative Centre has embedded students in the suburb that houses the director’s screen empire: the purpose-built facility, developed with Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings editor Jamie Selkirk’s Miramar Creative Ltd., is decked out with motion-capture, greenscreens and industry-standard post suites, and draws teaching support from Jackson’s Weta Workshop, Weta FX and Park Road Post Production just next door.
Patrick Brzeski, Lily Ford, Scott Roxborough and Etan Vlessing contributed to this report.
This story appeared in the July 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.