The University of Cambridge Alumni Group for Film and Other Media has just completed its most recent project, called “Pandora’s Box”, which was set up in South London in partnership with The Independent Film Trust (IFT), a Cambridge-based charity, together with the Documentary Film-makers Co-operative and the Self-Empowerment for Life’s Foundation (SELF) with support from using the ASD (Autistic Spectrum Disorder) Resource Base at Saint John Bosco College, a secondary school in Battersea which serves kids aged 11-18. This course is due to start next month.

And they are planning a third film-making project, with The Centre School in Cottenham, a village just outside Cambridge. This school has about 60 students, aged between 11 and 16. They bus in from across Cambridgeshire, and all come from quite tricky families, with a very wide variety of learning and behavioural issues.

These courses are based on a model called Film School in a Box, which the IFT developed with the Raindance organisation in London as means of supporting disadvantaged people who would not otherwise gain access to film-making equipment or to the knowledge about how to use it.

Similar courses have been run with various groups, ranging from adults recovering from mental-health problems to primary-school children with learning difficulties. In each case the main purpose of the course is to empower the participants by demonstrating to them that they really can make a film – and maybe do other things as well.

One of these earlier projects, run in 2015/6, was carried out in Cambridge in partnership with Balik Arts, another locally-based charity. This involved a group of 10 young people from eight different schools in Cambridge who ordinarily would probably never have met. But who had no problem working together on a project with a shared goal. There were four of British ethnicity, two British-Kenyan, one British-Turkish and three Kurdish.

Cambridge TV broadcast an item about the project in January 2016, and another when the completed film was shown at the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse on 25th April 2016.

The Group and the IFT are also using this cinema for a screening on 20th June of the short film made with the New Horizon Youth Centre, a charity which supports young homeless people in Somers Town in London. The film has already been shown in London, but is also being screened in Cambridge because the city contains quite a number of homeless-supporting charities, such as Jimmys and Winter Comfort for the Homeless.