Film & Media Studies

In this course, we will give a brief overview of series of imaginations of so called "ancient Japan" on mass media, how the imaginations were made, and the difference between the imaginations and reality. The examples mainly come from movies, including animation, video games.etc.

This course develops the ability to design and write creative narratives for games and interactive media. From worldbuilding to generating story development documents, player-character profiles, and interactive dialogue scripts, this course provides students with knowledge and skills central to the discipline. It will also pose critical questions that emerge around player agency and narrative experience, as well as ethical concerns around diversity in representation. 

This course explores screenwriting as a tool for cultural storytelling.

This course introduces the basic terminology of film form and concepts of film analysis. Film screenings cover various national cinemas, genres, modes, and directorial oeuvres from several historical periods. The course places emphasis on cinematic stylistics, but also considers film as an industrial system (of production, distribution, and exhibition) as well as a popular medium that both reinforces and challenges social norms and aesthetic codes.

The course examines gender and violence in Spanish literature and cinema from the Middle Ages to the present. Students analyze representations of gender, power, violence, and social norms through literary and film analysis, with attention to changing cultural perspectives.

A skills-based immersion in new media content — writing, shooting, editing, visualizing, and distributing across today's social media platforms. Students produce real content every week and receive professional editorial feedback throughout.

The course covers the full content spectrum, from journalism to lifestyle and entertainment, with a focus on building editorial judgment and ethical standards that separate trustworthy creators from noise.

The course examines gender, class, equity, and minority representation in contemporary Catalan cinema. Students explore how Catalan filmmakers portray social identities, inequality, cultural diversity, and marginalized communities, with attention to the role of cinema in shaping perspectives on contemporary society.

The course expands creative practice and challenges conventional boundaries through the development of interactive projects. It engages with contemporary art and design practices to craft audio-visual installations, explores the rise of interactivity in gaming and virtual reality, and creates projects that blend several media formats into immersive experiences. It reflects on the concept of (im)possible spaces (environments that challenge the notions of spaces and places within virtual worlds) and experiments with techniques such as animation and incorporation (e.g., creating avatars with integrated VFX/SFX). Using professionally recognized game engines and hardware (VR headsets, motion capture suits), the course teaches interactive experience design requiring minimal programming skills.

The seminar investigates the connections between the concepts of memory, the monument, film, and the archive through studying contemporary films and artistic interventions from Germany and the United States. Engaging approaches from art history, film and media studies, and memory studies, the seminar’s investigations are two-pronged: First, the course takes advantage of its location in Berlin’s historic center to explore how artists and activists have negotiated Germany’s histories of colonialism and Afro-German histories in urban spaces and on the HU campus. Second, students investigate how artists and filmmakers have translated the complexities of such memory work onto the screen. The seminar thus covers topics including monuments and memorialization, American and European legacies of slavery, the essay film as archive, film representations of the restitution of looted artworks, and the “restitution” of colonial images. The course studies recent films by filmmakers including Mati Diop, Jürgen Ellinghaus, Martina Priessner, and Marcin Wierzchowski.

The aim of this course is to enable students to understand the concept, development history, thematic content and technical connotations of world science fiction films, to improve their ability to interpret science fiction films and their aesthetic level through film viewing practice, and at the same time to reflect positively.