www.nsfw.org National Schools Film Week

National Schools Film Week is a film festival intended for students from primary and secondary schools across the UK. This year's events already took place in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (15-23 October 2009), and soon will come to Scotland. Festival is produced by the charity Film Education. As organizers state on their web site, the festival's purpose is:

to enrich the education of young people across the UK by providing schools with unique film and cinema based learning experiences inside and outside the classroom that are directly relevant to the curriculum, placing film at the heart of their cultural experience.

The festival is available to any primary and secondary school. Every spectator is welcome, the only limit is a space in the cinema. And - what's the most important - every screening is entirely free-of-charge. There is a lot of interesting films offered for this year's participants, including: "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs", "Night at the Museum" and "Secret of Moonacre and Coraline" for primary schools and "The Kite Runner", "Persepolis" and "Walz with Bashir" for secondary schools. National Schools Film Week goes beyond the film screenings. As organizers say:

A number of introductions, masterclasses, talks and events will take place before and after the screenings, including masterclasses on the process of film classification from a BBFC examiner, ‘Meet the Critics’ masterclasses by journalists, talks by senior lecturers at regional universities and storytellers.

Films for schools from Scotland are still available for booking on the National Schools Film Week web site.