The Stranger Festival 2009 took place in Amsterdam from 14 to 17 October and joined forces with our INDIE project.

The themes of our Inclusion and Diversity in Education project relate strongly to the European Cultural Foundation’s mission and key-projects, such as the Stranger Festival. Both the Stranger Festival and INDIE encourage young people to engage in current debates that concern them and their future. Both projects have as their core objective, the empowerment of young Europeans to become active citizens.

It was the second time that the ECF’s Stranger Academy had opened its doors in Amsterdam to young people from all over the world. Over 150 video-makers between the ages of 15 and 25 took part in the professionally led Stranger Academy workshops and presented their work to an audience of experts and other video fans. Among those participants were our INDIE Young Leaders who worked together to explore the fine points of video making and produce 10 one-minute videos on the themes of inclusion & diversity (you can watch the movies online, see the Watch the Movies section on the left column!).

Additionally 30 international youth educators from the INDIE network participated in the Stranger Expert Meeting on Friday 16 October where they were joined by British Council staff from a number of participating offices. Collectively we learned a lot about how we can engage with a variety of audiences by using online video. We also made some new and potentially interesting contacts with people from media and government organisations.

Once the creative work was completed, we organised an INDIE meeting on Saturday 17 October as a forum for young people to participate in organising the big INDIE event that will take place in Brussels in May 2010. Student voice has been a major driving force of the INDIE project and our Young Leaders gave us their ideas on how to present all the creative material they have developed in the framework of INDIE. Three of our INDIE trainers with the help of British Council staff facilitated this challenging session which saw our students still full of energy despite two tiring days of hard work on film making. As a result we now have an enormous amount of new and exciting ideas to showcase the Young Leaders creativity and messages on inclusion and diversity.  

The event was a success: our Young Leaders are already posting their views and sharing this great experience on our INDIE Ning platform and we will be posting the videos and other success stories on our INDIE website and on partners’ websites. Our partners and schools are also organising screenings of the movies made by our Young Leaders, and other follow up is planned in schools and beyond. The whole INDIE team has now been ‘refuelled’ with the energy to organise our next major events: our Partners & Policy Influencers seminar in Berlin at the end of November and the launch of the Best Practice Guidelines in Brussels in May 2010.

STAY TUNED...

Learn more about the Stranger Festival at http://www.strangerfestival.org/
 For more information contact indie@britishcouncil.org