Reel Youth's Partners in Education film program launches January 10th.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Fifteen youth, aged 8 to 14, signed up for the Reel Youth Partners in Education Film Program, which starts on Monday January 10th.

This online program is run by the Powell River School Board but, as might be expected, considering Reel Youth’s strong connection to Cortes Island, 7 of the 15 students are Cortesians.

“We have an office on Cortes, which is the office that you're most likely to find us in. Then we've got one in Vancouver and Toronto and Yellowknife. We have addresses in all those places,” said Erica Køhn, Artistic Director of Reel Youth.

Mark Vonesch, Director of Reel Youth, added, “We’ve made 2,500 films since we started and we have a tutoring film festival that tours across Canada and have made it sort of my livelihood just feel lucky to be able to have an office here on Cortez and, and run it from here. But most of our work happens off Cortez who do a lot of work in Northwest territories and Nunavut, Ontario, Saskatchewan. We've worked in every province and we've also done projects in Nepal, Morocco, India, and Vietnam.”

Students taking the PIE course will be trained to write, plan, shoot, and edit a short film.

There is an online classroom component two hours a day, for six days, ending on January 21st.

“Each film is so unique and has such a different flavour. There's something immersive and deep and personal about the resulting films that. Draws us to doing them again and again, because they are so illuminating and the young people are so proud of what they do,” said Køhn,

She and Marianne Barry will be the facilitators for this course.

It will conclude with a virtual gala of all their films. After which the films will be submitted to the real youth film festival and distributed on YouTube and the real youth website.

“I'd say probably 10, 15% of youth that do our programs end up pursuing film as a career, or are going in that direction. We always tell youth, use this program as a reference and, use my name and I'm happy to help you get into school and, or get you a job,” said Vonesch.

“We want all the youth who come to our programs to walk away with skills that are gonna serve them. No matter what career they end up choosing. If you're somebody who has storytelling skills, that's useful.”