Brooklyn College (CUNY) - Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema

I've been absolutely happy with Feirstein. Great community. State-of-the-art facility. You will be taking a risk on an up-and-comer school but should pay off. At least, visit the facilities.

The Feirstein School is a huge up-and-comer, a nascent program that will come to rival the top schools in coming years. Their equipment inventory, soundstages, and range of production and post-production facilities, including construction shop, FOLEY studios, many editing bays, motion capture, professional sound studios, not only give filmmakers a wealth of tools to make professional films, there is also the necessary staff, faculty, courses, and students to make full use of the facilities. Many of the professors also teach at other top film schools, mainly NYU and Columbia, as well as Pratt and others, so you're getting the same professor for a fraction of the cost. Another super important thing is the culture at the school, which is very much built around community, collaboration, and support. The refreshing lack of ego and competitiveness makes it a particularly good environment to learn and practice the craft of filmmaking. They also offer screenings, Q&As, workshops, and other such events that bring in members of industry on a regular basis. In addition, the school has a solid advisory council with mentors for students' thesis projects, including such names as Stephen Soderbergh, Ethan Hawke, John Turturro, and Darren Aronofsky. Far and away, Feirstein is the best film school you might never have heard of. But in ten to fifteen years, they'll be talked about in the same breath as Columbia, Emerson, UT Austin, and UCLA.

If you're a director you will be treated like a brilliant golden child whose story must be told, and have to do very little actual work/labor. You'll watch criterion movies and wax poetic about meaning and probably get into heated arguments about race/class.

All the other tracks (Cinematography, writing, etc) are set up to serve the directors. Essentially you are paying to work for free on student films. If you're lucky, maybe it will be a good one. And you get some glorious demo reel footage.

When I was there, we had no actual head of the cinematography department, teachers would show up late, with no plan for the class session, and basically wing it. They'd ask us "well, what do you wanna do? Wanna play with some lights?" Other teachers were arrogant and worked on one movie like 30 years ago. A handful were actively working in the industry, and therefore, their time at feirstein is a side-gig. Not so important to them. Understandable.

Also, getting gear and using the studios are a massive hassle.

Some of the admins are fine, but most are, in a classic hollywood/film world fashion experts at talking but not doing. Evasive and not accountable.

For a film school it's cheap, but considering you leave with basically nothing, it's very expensive. If you have money and time to burn, or a supportive partner/family that funds your life, it can be a fine way to spend 3 years playing around.

If you don't have have money or support, as in, you are a real person who works and pays to live in NYC, it's much much more difficult to make this work. And you will go into a lot of debt for this dream. So it's not really a place for poor people, to put it bluntly. Despite what their marketing may lead you to think.

If you really want to work on film sets, you're better off just doing that, starting as a PA or camera assistant, etc. If you want to make movies, shoot them on your phone. Because that's what you will do after spending 3 years here anyway.