Teaching Emotional Intelligence through Filmmaking: A Boovie Encounter

Abstract

Boovie is an annual festival and contest of adapting books into three-minute “book-trailers” for high school and middle school students in Romania. For the 2023 edition, together with Iulia Voicu, I held a workshop “Pedagogy through Film,” which was dedicated to pre-university teachers participating in the festival. This article is an expansion of the presentation I made in this workshop, which focused on the idea of teaching skills that can be conceptualized as “emotional intelligence” through filmmaking learning practices, specifically those related to film directing. The examples given (and main points) are: the necessity of learning how to deal with uncertainty in the educational process due to the high degree of relativism and subjectivity of art in general, and filmmaking in particular; the opportunity of questioning both micro- and macro- narratives in the process of screenwriting; and the complex communication skills that are needed in both working with actors and successful interpersonal relationships. Finally, this article discusses Sorin Botoșeneanu’s pedagogical practices, focusing on both the so-called “observational” and “unpacking” exercises and his postmodern approach to teaching, as a practitioner of horizontal pedagogy and attachment-based teaching.