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1/5
I graduated from the Moving Image program last year. With a bit of distance now, I can safely say that this institution, although initially friendly and welcoming, failed to fulfill most of its promises. On top of that, it was by far the single most toxic institution I have ever dealt with.
Although they pride themselves on being a small academy which would "professionalize your skills", most of us have only seen the downsides of AKI being a small academy.
When students sought crucial advice prior to the graduation year, they were even told; “go talk to your classmates” by the program directors.
Nowadays they promise to let you dive into working with the “essence of moving image” but it was a struggle to create a project that is actually relevant to the program, since we all lacked proper guidance, relevant theoretical course content and proper support. On top of that, we had to deal with the shortcomings and impediments caused by the organization and varieties of issues faced all along.
There were several occasions of outright abuse, with teachers behaving aggressively to cover up their own shortcomings at the expense of the student. The end-term exams, referred to as 'viewings,' were conducted poorly, and sometimes used as a tool to intimidate or gaslight students. Some of the program's key teachers would hold grudges over minor issues and use the grading system to punish students.
When these incidents were brought to the head of the program, you were met with a meaningless rhetoric or simply told to be quiet and accept the situation. Which is a typical behavior of a mob rather than professional educators. They would stick with each other despite their wrongdoings and would instead shift the blame or deny accountability altogether, all at your expense.
In the classes, they expected you to open-up and share all your process extensively. But even when you did so, the end term assessments lacked proper effort and clarity and mostly remained superficial, occasionally with major mistakes done by the teachers who supposedly followed you for the entire semester. In the entire 4 years of study, I barely received 2 feedbacks with proper value, luckily one being for my thesis. And we were graded almost completely arbitrarily. All that being the case, you could not trust the end-term evaluations to actually reflect your strengths and shortcomings, and for students who aimed for a post-bachelor degree, that was not very helpful. As well as for any student who wanted a truthful measure of their process.
Theories of identity and gender politics somehow overwhelmed the entire Contemporary Philosophy class, alongside some irrelevant postmodern doctrine in which the dose of cynicism was to the roof, emphasising division between races and genders rather than unity. When you questioned the relevance of these topics to the course program, you either were silenced or left without an answer. So I almost had to get into trouble to raise voice about it.
There was a general lack of creative and artistic spirit in the program, with very little content that actually had relevance and substance. As a result, most of us have struggled to formulate our research thesis in the final year that could actually be relevant to the program, unless, of course, it was related to those irrelevant discourses that were predominant in the first 2 years.
In overall, I would not recommend this place for talented internationals and locals alike. Witnessed too many students coming in bright but graduating completely drained or psychologically damaged.
Big Compliments to the staff though, whether be in the library, the office or in equipment rental, some great people there. And there were maybe 1 or 2 truly good teachers, well intended, but usually in the background, unfortunately.
