Cactus Edu

Born from the experience of the Cactus International Children’s and Youth Film Festival, Cactus Edu is an educational project designed specifically for schools, offering initiatives which aim to fulfill the objectives set out in Italian Law 220/2016 (defining the fundamental principles of public intervention to support cinema and audiovisual arts, as activities of relevant general interest). Cactus Edu promotes image education programmes whose objective is to strengthen audiovisual language skills.

Cactus Edu, created specifically for young people, fosters relational, cultural, and emotional growth experiences, using high quality cinema to provide an educational path which promotes and spreads audiovisual culture among children and youths.

This path is developed through a film competition for which students are invited to form “youth juries”, in each of the following age categories:

• 3+ section, for nursery schools and pupils in their first years of primary school;
• 8+ section, for pupils in their last years of primary school;
• 11+ section, for secondary schools.

The strong multicultural nature of Cactus Film Festival gives young audiences the chance to meet and debate with other people, encouraging them to listen to different points of view while being able to express their own.

Given the international outlook of the festival, the selection focuses mainly on films with little or no dialogue, especially for short films aimed at our youngest audience, without however affecting the importance of multiculturalism, which is conveyed not only through linguistic diversity but also through the uniqueness of each individual story. Cactus Edu believes that a truly inclusive school must build highly integrated environments, with technologies that promote autonomy and compensate for any difficulties which may be caused by disability, discomfort, and disadvantage.