Press review

Gone with the streaming

Der Spiegel, Germany, December 2023

"...Yet it would be necessary to give young people in particular access to film history. Not far from the Wiesbaden archive, in Frankfurt, 10 pupils are sitting in the classroom of the Herder comprehensive school on a gloomy December morning, watching on the smartboard as a cat switches from walking to running. The images are ancient, dating back to the end of the 19th century and belonging to the famous motion studies by photography pioneer Eadweard Muybridge. "Is this already a movie?" teacher Christian Dirksen asks his class.

The school participates in a film education program that was developed in France and is now being implemented in more than ten countries. It is called "Le Cinema, cent ans de jeunesse" (CCAJ), "Cinema, cinema, a hundred years of youth". The international network has been coordinated by the CCAJ and the DFF for two years. Over the course of a school year, pupils watch excerpts from famous works, which they relate to each other, and work on their own film project. This year, the focus is on documentaries, with the Frankfurt film class shooting at the nearby zoo.

Later, after watching an excerpt from Robert J. Flaherty's classic 1922 documentary "Nanuk, der Eskimo" (Nanook of the North), a discussion ensues about the extent to which documentaries are staged. When the class learns that some of the film was shot in sets, one pupil shouts: "That's fake news!" TikTok and YouTube have also led to people no longer believing moving images.

Wim Wenders, who was involved as a mentor in this year's "Cent ans de jeunesse" program, warns: "Neglecting awareness of the history of film means many missed educational opportunities." Which film artists will continue to accompany viewers? Chaplin and Garbo are likely to remain immortal. But Conrad Veidt and Louise Brooks will only make it if the memory of the slowly fading film history remains alive."

Oliver Kaever

An aesthetic film education project

AsKI kultur leben, Germany, February 2021

"The educational approach [of CCAJ] deals with film as a historically evolved medium, as a reference to diverse cultures and artistic expressions. Essence of the project work is a yearly changing project-topic, which is defined formally and not narratively. Like this it allows the participants to deal with the esthetic potentials of film and subsequently use them to express themselves. Analysis and practice go hand in hand. [Thanks to an additional open teacher’s course at the Kinemathek in Berlin] the practical knowledge generated during the project-activities can be shared with and spread into the German education system in a sustainable way. "

Bettina Henzler and Jurek Sehrt

A cinema aimed at young people

Criterio, Argentina, July 2019

"It was very interesting for us to adapt to the structure proposed by this programme (of the CCAJ) while maintaining our own approach and sensibility." Emiliano Ovejero

Pablo de Vita

The stories children tell

Metro Plus, India, November 2018

“Associating with Cinémathèque has the added advantage of being able to upload the films on its CCAJ blog network, which will not only be viewed by an international group but also gives CFA access to their content. ”

Shilpa Nair Anand

Life, the greatest cinema school of all

Corse-Matin, France, July 2018

“A hymn to the cross roads of life. In adolescence, that critical developmental phase, many paths to the learning and development of filmmaking skills have to be explored, as no one single approach works for everyone. […] Everyone has their own story to tell. There is often the issue of dropping out from school, difficult personal circumstance, the difficulty of finding a place in a system that struggles to marry academic study and personal and social development.” 

Sébastien Pisani

The opening of the Midnight Sun Film Festival, focused on Film Education

Keskipohjanmaa, Finlande, June 2018

“At the Climate screening, we saw a film from Helsinki, where a young woman undresses in the centre of the city, in the cold, while her cheeks and lips get redder and redder. Whereas the students of Legsby Primary School in England huddle up against each other on a park bench to protect themselves from the wind. This gives voice to a larger question, according to Nathalie Bourgeois, that of the underlying human nature that unites the characters in film.”

Hannu Björkbacka

Cinematic creation, the children of the world play their first role

Nihon Keizai Shinbun, Japan, May 2018

“Why did this project come about? I think it’s because “we are all searching”. Teachers, film professionals and children use each other’s skills and experiences to meet the same goal. Everything starts with a hypothesis – a question of cinema. Adults and children together, are all searching for the solution.  We don’t impose knowledge, we go on a learning journey together.”

What influence does cinema have on young people?

15 min, Lithuania, November 2016

“Taking part in this project has allowed me to start to understand my feelings better, and, in creating the script, allowed me to talk with other people. The most beautiful thing is that we’ve learnt how to reflect a character’s inner life through filming the wind, the sun, a cloudy sky, or trickling water” according to Severina. “I’ve learnt that by filming meteorological features we can express different emotions, which can sometimes be difficult to express in real life. I’ve found that in making cinema to obtain results I have to surpass, or understand better what it is that I want,” says Paula of her discoveries. For Kristupas his studies in cinema have opened up new means of communication. “We live in Anykščiai, a small town, where we all know each other really well, but by creating a film we revealed something more of ourselves. I found a team and we wanted to make films together again and again. This project has changed my opinion on fiction filmmaking: I understand that every datil in shot is important, and I’m bringing that level of attention to my own life in every day.”

Laura Kešytė

A film by Arago School at the Cinémathèque Française

L’Indépendant, France, June 2016

“Through the different cinematic activities proposed by the project, we’ve covered all the areas of our curriculum:  mastery of language skills for thinking and communicating; science and the humanities, knowledge of natural and technical systems, representations of the world, the shaping of the person and the citizen.” 

A nous le cinéma !

SMH n°385, France, July-August 2015

“Each year a central theme is offered to the participants.  For the edition of the project that ended in June, students were invited to investigate the interval, a rich theme, which allowed all kinds of sensibilities to be expressed, and to produce more intimate films, or films more rooted in their societal context."

Twenty Years of CCAJ

Bref n°112, France, August 2014

“The films illustrate the layout of today’s reality with lucidity and nuance, expressing a modesty of feelings, a range of desires, with questions about the future and offer up an x-ray of the new configurations of the family unit. The fixed and final nature of the films themselves is in opposition to the shared process of ever changing creation in which they’re made. Regardless, the quality of this or that interpretation of the project, the sensitivity to capture a certain quality of light or the dynamic range of a sound, the way to survey a space, to play pauses and beats, distils real moments of beauty.”

Jacques Kermabon

Cinema, Cent Ans de Jeunesse celebrates its 20^th year

NRP Collège, France, September 2013

“To see the forty films made as part of this project is to participate in an understanding of the power of shared knowledge, and to recognise the abilities of young people to transpose their way of life, surroundings, worries and desires through the medium of cinema. By its openness to all and its international dimension, the project proves itself to be a universally applicable model, a great repository of experience to introduce young people to cinema.”

Marie-Laure Guétin

Thirty-Seven Films That Could Change Lives

L'Humanité, France, June 2012

“It wasn’t a question of putting a modern camera, which are so easy to operate these days, in the hands of a first-time filmmaker and asking them to film whatever happens to pass in front of them. The theme [the place of reality in fiction] forced them to start off by writing a screenplay. Most often it was a very simple theme, a boy or a girl explore their home town, frequently peppered with the random encounters of everyday life as it passed by the camera, showing universally recognisable social situations. The ideas in the films didn’t spring from nowhere, as if by magic. A student from a Catalan school recalled that before going out to make their films they watched films by Sophia Coppola, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Olivier Assayas for inspiration. Another student from Portugal identified that “When we were about to shoot it was cloudy, which helped us to define our character”. And thus, a film is born.”

Emile Breton

The Little Filmmakers

Cahiers du Cinéma, France, September 2011

“To see the results of this year’s work, we can clearly say that the challenge of this project is to make a film with the children and not on them. One can imagine the difficult task that the teachers and filmmakers face, of not imposing ideas whilst also keeping control of the reigns and not letting the children go off in every direction.  […]  The viewer’s gaze is therefore doubly sharpened:  these are collective films created without a single author, and films ‘helped’ into being by a teacher and filmmaker, following a whole project which nourishes the children, who then return that same respect and momentum back to the project itself.”

Stéphane Delorme

In defence of Cinema, notes on Doc’s Kingdom

Expresso, Portugual, June 2007

“At the end of the Doc’s Kingdom festival a great surprise was had with the presentation of a series of films by high school students who take part in the  “Os Filhos de Lumière” workshops. [...] We feel that those responsible have encouraged creative freedom through their invitation to come and discover cinema through the project, creating the film lover of tomorrow. The resulting work is excellent […] We left Alentejo with living proof that, more than anywhere else, cinema has been defended.”

Francisco Ferreira