Film Passport Project: a journey around the world through cinema

At Ca’ Foscari, an internationally minded university in a multicultural city like Venice, which every year welcomes actors, directors and entertainment professionals from all over the world, we know very well how movies have the power to bring together people, places and cultures.

This is part of the reason why our Outreach and Recruitment Unit launched the Film Passport Project, a way to safely allow members of our university community to communicate with one another – to speak, to be heard and to listen.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been missing things we took for granted before: the opportunity to gather and get to know one another within the university community, learning about one another’s backgrounds, cultures and histories. Before the pandemic, the Office organized various events and activities to facilitate encounters and exchange – for example, Foreign-Language Aperitifs – but at the moment, such initiatives are not possible.

The Outreach and Recruitment staff members worked around these obstacles and asked 14 international students to propose a film that their peers could watch in order to learn more about their cultural worlds and specificities at a time when actual travel is not an option, encouraging them to contextualize their proposals by telling us also about themselves and the reasoning that led to their choice of film.

Ultimately, the project took the form of a booklet, a sort of passport, full of opportunities for cultural exploration and enrichment, that provides the reader not only with destinations, but also with knowledgeable guides willing to take you by the hand and show you the places and peoples they know most intimately.

Embark on this virtual journey across the globe, read all the submission here