Lyfta chief content officer Paulina Tervo, pictured centre, spoke to Business Doc Europe during IDFA Forum about her platform “where kids can learn about the world through stories.” She was in Amsterdam looking to acquire educational rights.
Accessible only by subscribers, Lyfta is described as “an award-winning immersive learning platform where teachers can easily build or curate powerful, interactive and curriculum-aligned lessons that bring learning to life.”
“Lyfta helps educators to engage and inspire digitally-native children and young people; foster critical skills and values for navigating our changing world; and broaden horizons by giving children and young people opportunities to see beyond their everyday realities,” continues the company mission statement.
Short documentary is at the core of the online learning experience, Tervo stresses. “That’s what brings that emotional connection for the students to connect with a story, a theme or a topic…Our vision is that by the time a child leaves school, they would’ve ‘visited’ every country in the world. They would’ve met a human being from that country.”
The company first attended IDFA in 2018, and Tervo says that over 50% of the films that she has commissioned since then have been sourced here in Amsterdam.
Lyfta looks to get involved at development or early production stage, Tervo points out, reminding that it is shorts she is looking to screen on the platform. “[But] quite often we meet filmmakers who are working on a feature and they’ll be doing a version for the Lyfta platform that is under 10 minutes. We shape that film together.”
Such an example is the feature Kristos, the Last Child by Giulia Amati, which world-premiered in Venice and screens at Docs for Sale 2022. “This was an interesting project because Giulia was basically making the feature the way she wanted to make [it]. She then sent it to us, we screened the film at Lyfta with our content team, and we started talking about how this might be edited,” Tervo remembers.
“We then went back to Giulia and we had a conversation, and she was thinking along the same lines. We said, ‘this is a chronological story, you meet this boy and then you follow him over a year when he graduates from school and then he leaves the island and there’s a beginning and an end.’ So it was very easy for us to collaborate because she…kind of had in her mind an idea of how to cut this into four episodes, which was the same as our idea.”
Lyfta also backed Inka Achté and Hanna Karppinen’s 14-minute short Jasmin’s Two Homes, world-premiering in IDFA Competition for Youth Documentary and produced by Finnish napafilms.
Tervo explains what initially motivated her to found Lyfta. “I had never really considered children as an audience [but] in 2016 I went to a school in Ipswich in England where we had been invited to come in and do a lesson with one of the interactive documentaries. And it was that day when we saw the kids who were as young as seven years old really engage with these short films that were presented in this immersive, interactive way,” she says.
“And we realized that day that actually children are an amazing audience for documentaries because they are the future. They need this, they yearn to understand better about the world, about the future that they’re going to be facing very soon. We saw that day that it was really important that we were distributing films to children.”
Other Lyfta staff attending IDFA are Head of Stories Charlie Phillips (top right), also head of video at The Guardian, and story producer Beth Simpson (top left).
