From Moscow with passion for Filmmaking!

GIFTS staff, students and friends were inspired and activated by the visit during the first week of September by Students and staff of Moscow International Film School, the inspiration of Alla Stepanova, MIFS current Art Director.

MIFS is an alternative high school with the provocative approach to learning which puts the students ideas into action through “The Freedom Project”, where they can explore, through the art of film making and through social action and collaboration with various communities, the answers to their questions about how to change the world for the better. They presented their film “The Roll Call” (about incarcerated youth in Russia), a product of the ongoing “Freedom Project” and finished off the visit to GIFTS with a gala evening of Russian folk theatre and song.

During their Canadian visit, MIFS students have connected with groups of disabled in Toronto, with educators in Edmonton, and other film schools such as GIFTS and Harris Institute for the Arts in Toronto.

MIFS seeks to establish collaboration between indigenous communities in Siberia (Altai Mountains) and in Canada (Salmon Arm, “Ancient Heart”) as well as elsewhere, and also to begin projects linking Canada and Russia in other areas of social concern, one dream being to establish a Youth Film Camp near Montreal where Ms. Stepanova currently resides.

From Russia, with a love for film is the heading on the Times Colonist News Story on May 07, 2004.