(Jaśmina Wójcik and Jakub Wróblewski, Poland)
Jaśmina Wójcik is an artist, activist, film director, and mother. Her films and documentaries often work directly with communities in their process and as their subject matter. Jaśmina’s newest film, King Matt the First, is no exception to this. In this film project, Jaśmina’s focus is on giving a voice to children. King Matt the First is based on Janusz Korczak’s novel and is made in collaboration with children based on the principles of grassroots education.
In her work with children, Jaśmina employs an ethos and methodology that rejects the primacy of the adult having authority over children. For several years, she has been involved in empathetic education by developing original practices for the creation of children’s artistic expressions. She gives agency and subjectivity to children, treating them as co- creators and inviting them into dialogue.
Alongside Jaśmina, we welcome Director of Photography, Jakub Wróblewski to ICAF. Jakub Wróblewski deals with visual storytelling and immersion projects. During the filming of King Matt the First, Jakub’s cinematography style was to react as a fly on the wall, to follow the children in a manner where the continuous presence of the cameraman was invisible to them.
Collaboration is important in both of Jaśmina and Jakub’s practices, particularly with other selected adult-artists who have their own practices and perspectives surrounding the notion of giving up adulthood and adapting tools and processes for working with children. In this workshop, Jaśmina and Jakub will not only show sections from the film, but will dive deep into the process of making a movie with children. Jasmina will pay particular attention to exploring tools that give children a voice, for example withdrawing from our own senses of “adulthood” to equalise our positions by playing children’s games and activities, or making sure the presence of the camera person is felt as little as possible by the children. Jakub will present a series of storyboards from the film as the beginning of the framework that transformed during the creative process.
