Year 2025-2026: LIVING SOMEWHERE (HERE AND ELSEWHERE)

Editorial

Focus

Participants

Blog

Last year

Editorial

For its 31st edition, the CCAJ is continuing the questioning begun with ‘the individual, the group and the community’. This time, the aim is to observe how people and characters fit into a here where they feel comfortable (or not), dreaming (or not) of an elsewhere, what happens when they leave their place or their social class of origin, or when they return to it... 

Workshops are set up in 12 countries, in Europe (7 regions in mainland France and overseas, in Germany, Bulgaria, Spain, Italy, Lithuania, Portugal, Romania and the United Kingdom) as well as in South Africa, Brazil and Japan. 

Pupils will have the whole school year, accompanied by their teachers and a filmmaker, to understand and experience how ‘living somewhere (here and elsewhere)’ is both a social, political and personal issue, and above all for us a question of cinema.

In June, the films made in the workshops - the results of this process - will be screened in the presence of their directors, aged 7 to 18, at the Caligari FilmBühne, in Wiesbaden, in partnership with the DFF - Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, in Frankfurt, general co-coordinator of the CCAJ programme.

Focus

Living somewhere means living in a place in the broadest sense (a country, a landscape, a village, a town), but also in a specific place of residence (a house, a flat, a building, a neighbourhood).

Living somewhere means living in a community with its own reference points, its own culture in the broadest sense, its own values. People's lives, their relationship with the world, their emotions and feelings are directly connected to the place where they live. 

Cinema allows us to enter the mind of a character whose environment and lifestyle are totally different from our own. It is the most appropriate art form for capturing and understanding this intertwining of a person and his or her environment. IIt uses specific means such as mise en scène, the treatment of space, cutting, the relationship with sound, editing. The script allows us to give greater or lesser importance to this relationship between the character and the place where they live. Between their idea of life and the place that surrounds them and where they actually live. 

This question lies at the heart of a category of films in which a character experiences a temporary or permanent change of location, living environment or social background during the course of the film. This subject can be explored in both documentary and fiction.

It is obviously an ideal subject given the diversity of CCAJ countries. It gives a real meaning to the exchanges between the different workshops around the world.