If your teenage child is following you around 24/7 with a video camera in their hand, especially when you walk around the house in your underwear, especially when you are not wearing makeup, especially when you break down and yell, especially when you want to talk to them in private, especially when… “Put your stupid camera away, how many times do I have to say it!!!” Now, it seems that you have been selected to become a protagonist of a documentary, and your child is taking their first steps in documentary film making, exploring their own personal boundaries and yours, learning to see and hear more acutely, gradually inventing their own film language, in order to tell something about themselves, about you, about what is the most important.

In this workshop, we will speak about the origin of Voronezh School of Teenage Doc, about what teenagers aged 13 to 18 do there, and most importantly, about where to start if you are 16 and you want to make a documentary. As an inspiration, we will watch a daring doc by 15-year-old directors from Voronezh.

Film Touch by the director Alina Stepanenko, Dina Barinova’s student, will be screened on the 26th of March, 1 p.m., in Cinema House, Blue Hall.

Dina Barinova was born in 1986 in Voronezh. In 2012 she received a scholarship to study at the Moscow School of Documentary Cinema and Documentary Theater, run by Marina Razbiezhkina and Mikhail Ugarov. The premiere of her first film, Shrove Sunday (2013), was held at the IDFA. In 2015, with the ‘blessing’ of Marina Razbiezhkina, a director and a teacher at the School of Documentary Cinema and Documentary Theater, she started to teach an experimental course of documentary making for teenagers in Voronezh. Her students, teenagers between 13 and 18, pick up cameras from the very first day, and following some strict rules, start filming their relatives.