University degrees: Postgraduate
Course city: Stockholm
The Master’s program in Film and Media with a specialization in Documentary Directing is aimed at those who want to specialize and deepen your knowledge in documentary directing. The program is research preparatory and consists of two years of full-time studies at the advanced level.
Traditionally, documentary film is a genre based on reality, real people and real stories. It still is, but documentary film has also evolved to become an art form that has its strength in the film’s very personal gaze and thus freely relates to reality. It’s called creative documentary. The documentary director can have an emotional attitude to his material, enrich it creatively with his own visions and use all the film’s narrative elements such as editing, music and photography. Basically, as with all film art, it is about having something you really want to tell, to be stubborn and harbor a strong need to communicate with an audience. Our training is organized so that the documentary filmmaker learns to work both independently and in teams.
Master’s program in film and media with specialization in documentary direction
The Master’s program in film and media is an in-depth and research-preparatory education with a common program structure for all fields. In the education theory courses, students are introduced to different perspectives on knowledge, theory, reflection and artistic research methods.
The direction of documentary directing is one of the team orientations within the master program that shapes film teams and collaborates. The students work together in joint lab courses where they explore different forms of film and new media. Documentary films today have several sub-genres, such as essay films, cinema verité, hybrid films but also investigative journalistic films. Documentary films can be character driven or based on personal or autobiographical. A story can be driven with narrative voice or expressed associatively and dialogue-free with images and sounds only. So here you can try working with different types of films – for different platforms and shorter and longer formats. You gain an in-depth knowledge of filmmaking as a process from idea to finished film where editing is often a crucial phase in the documentary process.
The education also has specialization-specific method courses. As a master’s student in documentary, you get to practice managing professional workflows from research and idea development to recording, editing and post-production. The insights and knowledge that you gain in the orientation-specific courses are applied in the lab courses and film exercises that are sometimes done in teams.
During the course, you get many opportunities for meetings over traditional occupational boundaries, for example through elective courses that are common to the institutions of the university. Each student here identifies their need for additional knowledge.
The training will give you specialized knowledge that prepares for research and to be able to work as a documentary film director.
