Ha! Ha! Ha! A film workshop to challenge stereotypes

Ha! Ha! ha! A film workshop to challenge stereotypes is a project that introduces filmmaking at public primary schools. Throughout comedy genre children find a space for self-representation and to challenge the topics that circulate in audiovisual fiction and in the media about girls and boys.

The project was born in 2018, designed jointly with the Tara collective, an association dedicated to the pedagogy, dissemination and creation of audiovisual culture and social and feminist thought. The aim is to bring boys and girls closer to the language of audiovisual fiction and non-fiction through meaningful learning.  From the reworking of standardized discourses and topical gender representations of childhood through comedy and ensuring that their creative proposals generate new stories that surpass and subvert the conventional ones.

The teachers join the children in this process of introspection, debate and representation that is transformed into a series of comic short films with specific formal premises that they must respect.

The workshop ends with the collective screening of the short films made by all the participant schools in iconic spaces for cinema and culture such as Filmoteca de Catalunya, for instance in Barcelona city.

Ha! Ha! Ha! is a project with a future perspective that has already accumulated 6 editions and has enjoyed the collaboration of institutions such Institut Català de les Empreses Culturals (ICEC),  Institut Municipal d’Educació de Barcelona (IMEB), Institut de Cultura de Barcelona (ICUB), Institut Català de la Dona (ICD), Ajuntament de Manlleu and the collaboration of  Torelló Mountain Film Festival, Manlleu Film Festival, Festival Protesa, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) and Foto K. 

The project had been selected to take part in Fundació Catalunya Cultura’s program Impulsa Cultura, being one of the 10 finalists which opted for Impulsa Cultura 2023 Prize.