This paper presents the project “Cinema at the Hospital?” which investigates the pedagogical power of seeing and doing cinema in pediatric wards in public university hospitals. Cinema allows an exercise in otherness: it is a stranger that enters the hospital and disturbs routines and structures. It is thought of not in the sense of a pedagogical support for conveying knowledge, but as the mark of a creative gesture: an art. It can be expected that, together with cinema, other forms of learning, connections and meanings will be found in the hospital, which may contribute towards conducting education with renewed ways of thinking about the relationship with learning, art and health. The first experiments have shown that most patients are unfamiliar with the experience of the “ritual” of the darkened room and that they are open to and enthusiastic about other filmic and esthetic possibilities.
Cinema and education; Art; Health and education; Education in hospital