Sharpening the Gaze with Maja Krajnc

Contact with film helps to create aesthetic sensitivity and strengthens the adolescent’s media literacy. The film allows young people to identify with a variety of experiences and meet different views of the world. But first and foremost, film stimulates the imagination, emotions, artistic and scientific creativity, and encourages critical thinking and evaluation.

This year, world-class stop motion animation will be celebrated at the festival venues as part of the Sharpening the Gaze workshop. With selected film sets and in a relaxed festival atmosphere, participants will discuss what they have seen, contemplate the idea of animation as a weapon and try to round their thoughts into texts with the help of mentors. The texts will be published on the festival website and on www.e-kino.si. Sharpening the Gaze is a film education and creativity programme for youth, organized by KINO! Society for Expanding Film Culture, and will be led by Maja Krajnc, PhD, editor-in-chief of KINO! magazine.

Maja Krajnc (born in 1982) holds a PhD in Media Studies from ISH. Since 2007, she has been a (founding) member of the editorial board of the magazine KINO!, and since 2011, she has been the editor-in-chief of the magazine for film KINO! and president of KINO! Society for Expanding Film Culture. In the field of audio-visual art, she works as an author and editor of publications (Slovenian editions of Disintegration in Frames by Pavel Levi, Cinema against Spectacle by Jean-Louis Comolli, Alain Bergala’s The Cinema Hypothesis. Teaching Cinema in the Classroom and Beyond, Emmanuel Barot’s Camera politica, Autumn Film School 2016: Aspects of Post-Yugoslav Film). As a regular external collaborator of the Slovenian Cinematheque, she coordinates, prepares and implements the pedagogical programme “Kino-katedra” for primary and secondary school students; and is the author of an educational handbook for teachers Basics of Film Creativity. She coordinates and executes the project Understanding Film. Under the auspices of the KINO! Society, she implements an educational programme for youth Sharpening the Gaze and collaborates with many film institutions and festivals.