Every dream has a story…

Don Bosco International Media Academy (DBIMA) is the first Salesian Cinema School in Europe to promote media education in 21st century. DBIMA aims to be an ingenious centre for All Youth through digital media training. The mission statement of DBIMA is opening doors of opportunities through media education for youth to inspire the digital and media world.

How? When? Why? Who?

Past 3 Salesian General Chapters (2006-2020) enunciated a lot about media, digital world, and communication. The Salesian Congregation encouraged the Salesians around the world to get trained and engaged actively in the media world. In response to this call, the Salesians of the Province of FRB under the leadership of Daniel FEDERSPIEL decided to send one of his confreres, John Paul SWAMINATHAN, a Salesian hailing from Tamil Nadu-India, to do his master studies in filmmaking to Paris from 2015 to 2017. During his studies, he discovers an important social truth that most of his classmates were sons and daughters of filmmakers and they were undoubtedly very rich. This reality raised a lot of questions in his mind: If someone is poor, is he or she not allowed to dream to be a film director? Is he or she not allowed to get qualified in the media? The Salesians run more than 1,800 schools in Europe but not even one school offers media education and why? With these questions, he met the provincial, Daniel FEDERSPIEL in 2017. In dialogue with him, John Paul discovers something he never heard before:

When Don Bosco came to Paris in 1883, the city was still recovering from a cholera epidemic and the political upheaval in the wake of ‘La Semaine Sanglot’, the final bloody end of the Paris commune. To establish the Salesian presence in the city, he chose the tough hilltop neighbourhood of Ménilmontant, a depressed, densely populated working-class area inhabited by street youths that was the last stronghold of the fervently anti-religious communards (Ceria, Volume XVIII 1886-1888). After much struggle, he built a home, an oratory, and a school for boys. A year later when the opportunity came to expand the Salesian presence, he built the Theatre Ménilmontant as a place of refuge for children to learn and participate in the arts.

The project of DBIMA will mirror the original Ménilmontant Theatre in the coming years and the surrounding Salesian property will be revitalized and developed into a bustling arts and media hub that mixes media education and commercial enterprise in one technically advanced campus. This new ‘blended’ initiative will be the first of its kind with students from all over the world, benefiting from a Salesian spirited arts and media education with the potential of post-graduation career opportunities. The real hero and founder of DBIMA is Don Bosco himself.

Education is the very heart of the Salesian charism. Accompanying young people to adopt to these digital media tools in a constructive way is to make them a real form of expression in an artistic way. This mission at the heart of DBIMA is to create a cinema and an audiovisual school that offers young people training in media to which they have not had access until now, whether for economic, social, or psychological reasons. This initiative is based on the idea that media training is indispensable to all.

Re-started the original vision of Don Bosco in the form of DBIMA in 2020 during the Covid-19 crisis with 8 students, it turned to be 24 in 2021, and we are set to make it 60 students for September 2022. DBIMA stood firm in all the difficulties and progressed always forward with a strong conviction and a clear goal to serve all.

For more information please contact us : info@dbima.eu