A little over fifteen years ago, I enrolled at a school that in practice, was more of an experiment. There had never been a boarding school in Jordan. With only one foot in the pool, I attended as a day student, opting to withstand the ninety minute commute each way.

A year in, the school invited me to try boarding. I had resisted the idea at first. If the difference was a commute, well, I could sustain that. Nonetheless, they persisted and traveling parents made it a convenient moment to try boarding. The first night in, I distinctly remember calling my mother and saying “we’ve got a problem.” I was hooked. It was immediately clear to me that I would stay a boarder until I graduated.

So what was it that made boarding so special? My years at The Film Guys have shown me that there is something ineffable about the boarding school experience that can’t be put into words, yet can be immediately felt if you experience it yourself. When words have a go, they often sound like:

“Community, community, community.”
“Feeling supported by my teachers.”
“I am learning independence.”
“Live with my friends.”
A few more mentions of community.

I might be able to mount a compelling case that we live in societal structures that alienate us from our natural primate community setting, and that if we made a zoo exhibit for a teenage human primate to thrive, my bet is we would make it a lot like a boarding school. This might be the strongest case I can make, but perhaps a two minute video isn’t the place.

Now, there are two types of people in relation to boarding school. Those who’ve experienced it, and those who haven’t. Generally speaking, the experienced ones won’t hesitate to offer the experience to their children. Those who haven’t need convincing. In Jordan, almost nobody has experienced boarding school. This is a country where kids don’t leave the nest until they marry.

Add to the recipe that Jordanian audiences like to be given it straight. They don’t take kindly beating around the bush. Those five above bullet points likely wouldn’t land with potency upon the Jordanian ear. The Jordanian audience needs a compelling, yet concise case. Something logical, something that makes sense, something with power.

King’s Academy faces this messaging challenge every day. So I decided, after my years of serving boarding schools together with The Film Guys team, that 2023 was the moment I might try my hand at helping my school express the ineffable through the media form I am most passionate about… film. The passion I found playing with cameras and friends during the unscheduled hours at boarding school.

Among those friends was Suhayb, who was now working as the in-house filmmaker at King’s. Sharing my passion for our school and for filmmaking, he and I set out to tackle this Goliath of a marketing task. The task of making a compelling case for boarding to a Jordanian audience, of making a convincing argument that makes sense, is memorable, and of course (we are The Film Guys after all) entertaining.

We thought about why King’s Academy exists in the first place. King Abdullah II of Jordan attended Deerfield, loved his school so much that he built his own boarding school in Jordan, partially in Deerfield’s image. We figured, if that isn’t a vote of confidence for boarding school, then what is? He chose it, after all. He chose it to serve his country in the best way a school might be able to, and for him, boarding school was the obvious model. As the kids might call it, that move was a “full send”, or a full commitment to the model, definitely not a half commitment.

We’ve been close friends for fifteen years, surely because of our boarding school bond.

Then it clicked. The video idea developed further through an Arabic play on words. To say you do something “nos kom” is to say you do something with a half-sleeve, or a half measure. It would follow that if you attend a school for all of your day, rather than a third of it, you’re getting more bang for your educational buck, right?

Surely, it’s not so simple, but in some sense, it is. You’ve heard it said before, “Boarding school happens between 3pm and 8am”. Isn’t that another way of expressing the same idea?

Short of inviting parents and prospects to try boarding, we had to mount a case as to why it might be worth it in the first place. A case that could land on any ear, regardless of their boarding school experience.

The play on words extended further at the end, when Suhayb expresses that we don’t want a half-sleeve, nor a quarter-sleeve nor a third-sleeve, we need a full-sleeve. Except when he says “kol kom” (full sleeve) in Arabic, the sentence actually reads “We need all of you.” It’s much more lyrical in Arabic.

Through this video, we sought to encapsulate the ultimate point of our school. King’s Academy exists to serve Jordan, to lift it higher and to bring the future’s change makers together in a way only boarding school can. We sought to demonstrate how far two of the school’s first boys have come, by making a film that was a true reflection of the youthful exuberance and silliness that spurred our filmmaking in the first place.

With a bit of Beethoven infused drama, we wrote this script as homage to the great oratories of history.

We are children of this school, and we hope our gift reflects our love. King’s Academy is where we found the passion we are fortunate to call our vocation, and we hope our filmmaking might allow audiences to consider boarding school in a way they hadn’t before.

An Oration for Boarding School

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