ABSTRACT
This chapter examines why filmmakers tell stories and why students in schools need to tell stories. In film learning, students not only have to learn how to create film stories, they have to embody the story by acting it out. The film story created for the Shostakovich Project, for example, was the students’ imagined story of their real-life story. The magical realism of the film story was based on a truth in the students’ own lives. They had transformed and explored their reality through an imagined fiction. The creation of film stories as a process is a way for students to navigate understandings of their lives and those of others. In class, students’ exercises in film learning must ultimately be screened to an audience of others in the class. The imagined world of film stories is a ‘play-space’ or make-believe world where students can explore ideas, thoughts and feelings, testing what Erik Erikson calls the potential of ‘reality’ beyond ‘actuality’.
