Europe is getting serious about film business training. Richard Brass speaks to graduates from some of the key courses.

Nina Roman is one of the students in the inaugural year of the Film Business Academy's MSc in management (film business stream), which ends in July. The experience of being one of the pioneers has allowed her to play a part in shaping the UK-based course.

'As this is the first year they're doing it, we all went in knowing there might be some things to be worked out, so in some ways we've been trying to guide them along with what works and what doesn't,' she says.

'We've also learned a lot from each other, because we're a small group.

'I chose this course because I was very interested in the combination of business skills and film content. It was the first one like this I'd seen in Europe.

'The course was probably going to have more film content at the beginning, but now it's part of the MSc management in the film business stream, so there's a little bit less film than there was supposed to be. So in the first term, we learned a lot about accounting and financing that we may not have had in the original format.

'But when we started term two, with more film-intensive courses, we definitely needed to have a good background in finance and accounting to understand it, so that was good.'

Roman's aim is to work in the marketing department of a US studio, and the student group has just returned from Cannes where they had a first-hand taste of how it is done for real.