Primaped

PrimaTeen

The PrimaTeen project was born at the 2019 Primanima Festival, when we launched a new section of animated shorts specifically for teenagers. Already during the selection of the films, we involved Krisztina Peer, a clinical child and youth psychologist, who helped the festival's programme curators to ensure that adolescents were indeed exposed to animated films that were appropriate for their age.

It was also important that viewers were not just passive consumers of this content, but that a real conversation around the themes of the films could take place, so Krisztina Peer also facilitated discussions with school groups during the festival. This new programme section was a great success at the Budaörs venue in 2019, and a short specialised PrimaTeen package was also sent to other PrimaTeen screening venues in Hungary and abroad (Pécs, Sopron, Székesfehérvár, Szekszárd, Szeged, Oradea, Cluj-Napoca, Cluj-Napoca, Chișinău, Sfântu Gheorghe), where facilitated discussions also took place.

The PrimaTeen international and national selection of short films aims to engage teenagers through a comfortable visual world, and through the films they can talk to each other about topics such as bullying, sibling rivalry, friendship, connecting with others, peer pressure, and living through crisis situations. One of the most important tasks of adolescence is to find an identity, for which it is essential that young people are able to talk about social and individual problems with their peers and relevant adults, and to integrate and accept themselves in the peer community. These films and the discussion about them are intended to assist this process.PrimaTeen also follows examples from abroad and Hungary too, such as the Berlinale's 'Generation' section, and the highly successful Suli Mozi and Student Verzió, to expand the possibilities of visual culture education and to create opportunities for young people to communicate through animated films.

PrimaTeen has now grown into a programme and, with the involvement of other professionals (drama teachers, art therapists), it will tour the country for the first time in 2022 with the support of the National Cultural Fund (NKA). Our aim is to reach places where media literacy and visual culture education have not been a priority so far. For those schools that we cannot visit in person, we will distribute the screening programme online, along with the session plan prepared by Rebeka Kajos and Márton Somorjai, and proofread by Krisztina Peer. This will help teachers, social workers and other support professionals to run the programme.