Film students urged to get reel

CARMEL Winters,the playwright and filmmaker who is University College Cork’s new film artist-in-residence, says she is not peddling the illusion that students are guaranteed work afterwards.

Winters, who wrote and directed her debut film, Snap, is lecturing 24 students in their second year of the BA in film and screen media. “What I’m doing with the students is a marriage of the theoretical and the practical,” says Winters. “The students are there because they want to make films. But it’s basically a lottery, no matter what country you live in. The respected psychologist Daniel Kahneman said that if you interview a group of 18-to-20-year-olds about what they want to do, the one group that is pretty much guaranteed to be unhappy with their choice are the people who choose performing arts.

“It can be film, theatre or music. Essentially, the success rate is very low. I know that I’m at UCC teaching film and that attitude might sound defeatist, but I believe it’s real.”