Film English Review: Video Lesson Plans Built Around Authentic Shorts

Film English is an ESL/EFL lesson-plan library built around authentic short films and contemporary feature-length movies. The site was founded by Kieran Donaghy, a teacher trainer known for promoting film as a teaching tool, and is built around what the team calls a Multimodal Methodology: every lesson integrates viewing, listening, speaking, reading, writing, and visual representation across three staged phases.

The library has three product types:

• Video Lesson Plans — built around short films and authentic online videos. Pre-viewing stage, viewing stage, post-viewing stage.
• Extensive Viewing Guides — for contemporary feature-length films across drama, comedy, thriller, sci-fi, biographical, and coming-of-age genres.
• Film Study Worksheets — printable handouts designed to support extended viewing in class or as homework.

Topics range across character education, environment, global issues, technology, relationships, work, and travel. Lessons are tagged by CEFR level (A2 through C1 on the live site; catalogue lists A2–C2) and by topic, so you can search by what your students need.

Film English works best for these specific classroom situations:

• Video-led lessons for teens and adults: each plan comes with a chosen short film or video, plus a structured worksheet sequence. You can run the lesson with minimal prep.
• Cultural and global-issues units: themes like human rights, climate change, identity, and empathy are central to the library. Useful when your syllabus calls for values-based content.
• Film clubs and extensive viewing: the Extensive Viewing Guides let you assign feature-length films over a term with structured pre-, during-, and post-viewing tasks.
• Teacher training and methodology modeling: the Multimodal Methodology is itself a teaching reference. Trainer Kieran runs workshops on the framework.
• Substitute teacher days: print the PDF lesson plan, hand the sub the video URL and the worksheet, and the lesson runs without you.

Yes — for video-first teachers at A2 through C1. Film English has built a deep, well-tagged library around something that's genuinely hard to do well: lesson plans based on authentic video that actually hold up in class. The €90/year Unlimited plan is fair value if you teach with film regularly.

The main constraint is the video-first format. If your classroom has no projector, no reliable internet, or a strict no-streaming policy, the plans won't translate. The site also assumes you can cue video at exact timestamps — most plans require that.

Honest recommendation: try the Basic free tier first. Pull three or four free lesson plans and run them in your next unit. If your students engage with the videos and the pre-viewing tasks, the Unlimited tier at €90/year pays for itself within a term.