Over the next three years, “Exploring, Cinéma, cent ans de jeunesse!” is set to be evaluated as an Erasmus+ project, led by a consortium of cultural institutions and schools from Germany, France, Bulgaria and Portugal, as well as the universities Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris and the University of Bremen.

The programme, for which the Cinémathèque française has been responsible for 25 years, has been supported since 2021 by the association Le Cinéma, cent ans de jeunesse! (CCAJ) as well as by the institutions Documentaire sur grand écran, Ciné 104, Pantin and the DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum.

The project has demonstrated how love for cinema can unite children and young people from many countries of the world, “from Japan to Lithuania, and from Brazil to France”. For an entire school year, participants discuss questions such as “Why move the camera?”, “How do you introduce reality into a fiction film?” and “How can time be experienced in a film?” For months, children, teachers and film professionals watch films together, work on individual exercises and later make their own collective film. In June, the participants watch their works together in a cinema in the Paris area, where they present and discuss them.

The participating schools – IGS Herder in Frankfurt, Germany; ObU Neofit Rilski in Dermantsi, Bulgaria; the Collège Thomas Mann, France; and Escola Secundária Marquês de Pombal, Portugal – were selected in accordance with the diversity and inclusion objectives set out by the Erasmus+ programme.

These CCAJ workshops will be followed up by the universities in the academic years 2022/23 and 2023/24, and the participants will be interviewed for evaluation purposes. Further meetings between the network partners will also allow for reflection on common pedagogical issues.

The project’s final event, set to take place in the Paris region in the summer of 2022, will move to Frankfurt in 2023 and to Lisbon in 2024. These gatherings will be attended by other students participating in the CCAJ in at least 11 countries.

The programme was founded in Paris in 1995 by a collective built around the filmmaker and film theorist Alain Bergala and Nathalie Bourgeois, a film educator and founder of the Cinémathèque française’s Film Education department.