From March 13th to March 27th 2024, Finnish screenwriter Jan Nåls collaborated with students of FAMU International. Focusing on screenplay development with students of the Directing Cinema and Digital Media Master's program, the aim was to advance scripts towards the final stages of development, allowing instructors in directing workshops to initiate film production preparation well in advance. The intensive work aimed for significant progress in scripts towards a finished form, subsequently to be produced into film (exercise).

With his profile, knowledge and extraordinary human friendliness, Jan Nåls has complemented FAMU International's tribal directing mentors at a critical time in the semester.

About the lector:
Jan Nåls was born in Helsinki in 1970 during the height of the Cold War. Helsinki was a small city and in many ways still is. He attended school there and continued his studies at the University of Helsinki. In the mid-1990s, he began working as a screenwriter and in the early 2000s as a script consultant and teacher in film and media. He continues to write and develop fictional stories and concepts, and has also written factual books on various subjects such as sports betting and modern theater. In his creative practice, he deals with themes of displacement, identity, and power.

He also teaches screenwriting and directing at the Department of Culture and Media at Arcada UAS, where he serves as a lecturer. For over ten years, he was part of an exchange program between Africa and Finland, an experience that shook his worldview. It also changed his approach to storytelling and led him to pursue a doctoral degree at the University of Helsinki, where in 2019 he successfully defended his dissertation. In his dissertation, he explored the functions of empathy in intercultural narratives and is still interested in what emotionally moves us and how we come to understand others.

https://www.nalsjan.com/about

The project AMU, Guest Workshop - Jan Nåls, application registration number 0316000016, is implemented with financial co-participation from the European Union through the National Recovery Plan and the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.