Get Arts-Educated In Prague
A Lovely Week at FAMU
Come one and all to Prague’s most enlightening school of arts and entertainment: The Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU). Along with DAMU and HAMU (dedicated to Theatre and Music/Dance, respectively), FAMU is one of the leading foundations of young international creatives seeking an intensive arts education. I have been studying at FAMU for almost a month now, thanks to their CIEE partner program available to all SLU students, including myself and Madigan Maurer ’26.
Since beginning the program, Madigan and I, and 17 other dedicated students from across the U.S. have been attending core classes on film storytelling, acting, editing, sound design, cinematography and directing. Our first endeavor was our storytelling workshop taught by a very blunt Czech professor. That class is where we learned most about the style of Czech teaching to come; each professor will not hold back, constantly making the student feel like they are teetering between knowing everything and nothing. Students who initially came to the program with the most concrete concepts get shot down quickly for practical or moral reasons, often settling for a story that will be as emotionally fulfilling as it will be practical to make.
Through the workshops, students soft-pitched their ideas for 7 to 10-minute-long short films. After a few classes, students began to group up into teams of a director, editor, and director of photography. One such project, which I have been closely involved with, is entitled “Rock Bottom,” written and directed by Annie Zulick ’25 of Ursinus College and Veronica Silvosa ’26 of Northwestern University. The story, after a month of workshopping, revolves around a heartbroken man trying to move on from a past relationship by sparking a romantic (and sexual) relationship with a rock. After finishing the script and scouting for filming locations, the dynamic duo will begin filming in November. The filming process includes an authentic film camera with 24-minutes of 35 mm film, which means there is little room for mistakes.
But the students have nothing to fear (just as you will not if you apply!). The current crew of CIEE FAMU students are all incredibly close with each other, having united under the mutual enjoyment of artistic creation and college-life shenanigans. From our apartment building in Prague 2, the tram ride is roughly 20 minutes to FAMU and often accompanied by a cast of vibrant characters, including texting nuns, disoriented school children, and pregnant greyhounds. These vivacious characters have brought inspiration to all students and have only enhanced the authentic Czech experience. I must add that the best lunch spot near FAMU is Winnie, a casual café with the cheapest and most satiating open-faced sandwich in Czechia. It may be the best thing to come out of FAMU since Miloš Forman!
Recently, we began elective courses, studying European cinema, the realm of montage, visual theory, and more. These are the classes most students most look forward to, rewarding them with broad, philosophical meanderings on film language and exposure to other international FAMU students.
All in all, I have written this article to encourage you to apply. It is pointless for me to only sing its praises, but I hope I have given you a realistic image of the university. It is wildly exciting and inventive, full of a century’s worth of history. Its nestled home in Prague is the monolithic honing beacon for any St. Lawrence student seeking an exciting semester in the Czech Republic.