The Sharjah International Film Festival for Children and Youth, organized by the Foundation for the Promotion and Support of Media Art for Children and Youth, organized a workshop entitled “How to Become a Film Critic”, which was attended by 42 children and young people aged between 10 and 20 years, over four days.
The workshop, which was hosted by the Sharjah Girls Festival, is in line with the Foundation's goals to enhance the skills of children and youth who have been selected to serve as members of the panel of promising judges at the Sharjah International Film Festival for Children and Youth, which will select the winning film in the category “Child-made and emerging film”. This session of the festival. The workshop, presented by Emirati filmmaker and scriptwriter Abdullah Al Humairi, provided participants with a passion and desire to work in the field of cinema, the opportunity to develop their artistic skills and enhance their critical abilities by learning the fundamentals and principles of cinema criticism to enable them to critically film.
Sheikha Jawaher bint Abdullah Al Qasimi, Director of Art and Sharjah International Film Festival for Children and Youth, said: “This workshop is a continuation of a series of workshops that have taken a scientific and entertaining approach to facilitate the delivery of information to children and youth, especially as all those who supervised the workshops have their own specialties. "The experience of dealing with the younger generation, and the ability to transform the place of the workshops into a stimulating work environment lead to great results and outputs."
The director and filmmaker Abdullah Al Humairi stressed that the selection of children and adolescents was based on their previous experience, especially as they participated in a number of training workshops on cinema and its arts, and therefore the workshops came to remind them of the stages of the entire film industry, and criticize it through the viewer of the viewer and not the manufacturer. The Emirati director expressed his admiration for the interaction of the participants in the workshop and the abilities they showed, explaining that although the concept of criticism and its objectives is difficult to reach young people, they were able to know this aspect remarkably, pointing out that the group participating in the workshop is now able to evaluate and critique children's films.