Norden at the Cinema

In general, Nordic languages are being squeezed off the school curriculum. The Nordic Cultural Fund's major 2005 language survey "Inter-Nordic Language Understanding" revealed that Nordic youngsters are no longer quite as good at understanding each others' languages. Half of the secondary school pupils who responded received no teaching in Nordic languages at school.

The project NORDEN AT THE CINEMA offers Nordic language and media teachers new film-based teaching material. The target for 2008-2009 is to involve more than 1,000 classes from 9th grade and upwards all over the Nordic Region, i.e. that 25-30,000 pupils aged 15-19 will be given the chance to improve their knowledge of the other Nordic languages.

Multimedia teaching using Tolerance as its theme and film as its tool will inject new life into teaching Nordic languages to the pupils. The aim of the project is not only for the pupils to improve the ability to understand each others' languages, but to learn more about film as a communication tool and even more important to increase tolerance on several levels among the Nordic youth.

"Norden at the Cinema" is envisaged as an annual event with a new theme every year.

The project is being run by the Federation of the Norden Associations (FNF) and the Nordic information offices. Most of the funding has been provided by the Nordic Council of Ministers (Nordplus Language Fund).

The teaching material is available only via this website (www.nordenibio.org). It consists of a specially produced DVD with five new Nordic short films and an especially composed teaching compendium.

Contact:
Carl Liungman, Federation of the Norden Associations,
E-mail: Carl(at)norden.se
Phone: +46 (0)40 23 86 10