College International
Writing, Filmmaking & Everything in Between
A few things you should know before choosing this College
You’ll be joining people from all over the world in this College. In the last years we’ve had students from USA, Holland, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, France, Sweden, Israel, Nigeria and Russia, as well as Italy.
So the first thing you need when you enrol in International is a sound knowledge of English; this will be the language you use with your classmates and the language the lessons are given in. You will also write all your copy in English.
Other advantages include curiosity, a spirit of adventure and the ability to adapt – it’s not easy to move to the other side of the world to study for two years. We’ll help you of course, but you must be prepared to use your own resources too, to get by in situations such as renting accommodation and going shopping; these things may seem banal, but in a country like Italy where few people speak English (or speak it badly), it’s really not that simple.
Apart from this you don’t need to have any specific training or previous studies; you’ll be exploring lots of narrative pathways and forms of writing, and you might even discover a talent you never knew you had.
What you’ll be doing over the two years
You’ll work with international writers or Italian authors living abroad. You’ll get the sensation of being immersed in a vast landscape: you might have lessons with a Romanian writer one week, and the next you’ll be working with a story editor from the BBC or an American producer.
You’ll follow a path with two main strands – narrative and cinema, but there will be many forays down side paths, especially during the first year: poetry, oral storytelling and body language, drama, documentary, essay writing, journalism, TV series and a focus on particular genres.
You’ll begin writing a lot from day one, even if at first you don’t know which direction you want to take. Don’t worry, it’s all part of the teaching strategy. During the second year some narrative areas will be dropped and others will be introduced – ab initio, or building on what you already know. This will be preparation for the Opening Doors project at the end of the two years.
Practice will overtake theory, and in addition to working on your copy you’ll also learn how to analyse what your classmates write in order to sharpen your critical sensitivity and editing skills. There will be cinema and documentary workshops, for which the class will form a crew, a newsroom or a screenplay writing room, depending on the particular project you’re working on and helping each other with.
The teacher and the College coordinator will follow your stories very closely, even during the months when you’re not at Holden.
The Master of 2022-24 will be the writer Eshkol Nevo, while the Master of 2021-23 is the novelist and scriptwriter Stephen Amidon.
Each year is divided into three terms – from October to December you’ll be in Turin, from January to March you’ll do your classes online, and then we’ll meet up again in March through to June.
What you’ll be able to do by the time you leave
You’ll have an extremely varied final portfolio; it could contain a script for a short film, short stories, the start of a novel or the concept for a TV series, and you’ll have made at least one short fiction film or documentary on which you worked as a screenwriter, director or producer. For example:
- you’ll know how to edit a literary text;
- you’ll have learned to write screenplays for films and TV, or theatrical dramas;
- you’ll be able to work as a script editor for the cinema or the theatre, a copywriter, a content curator or web content editor;
- for any project you start, you’ll know how to take it forward, and having worked with international professionals you’ll have a wide sphere of reference through the contacts you’ve cultivated over your two years here at the school.
