30 years of “Le cinéma, cent ans de jeunesse”

Carte Blanche for Natalie Bourgeois and Alain Bergala

The renow­ned film edu­ca­ti­on pro­gram “Le Cinéma, cent ans de jeu­nesse” (CCAJ) will be thir­ty years old in 2025. Founded in France in 1995, it has grown ste­adi­ly and now spans a net­work of cine­ma­the­ques and film initia­ti­ves, film­ma­kers and tea­chers in 15 count­ries across four con­ti­nents. With annu­al­ly chan­ging aes­the­tic ques­ti­ons and a very spe­cial pedago­gi­cal approach, more than 1,600 short films have been made in the three deca­des of the pro­gram’s exis­tence, shot by young peo­p­le as the result of a who­le year of inten­si­ve enga­ge­ment with film as art. In many respects, this is a uni­que reser­voir of a young gene­ra­ti­on’s cine­ma­tic enga­ge­ment with the world, which will hop­eful­ly soon be made acces­si­ble as an archive.

For four years now, the DFF has been hel­ping to secu­re the unfort­u­na­te­ly always fra­gi­le exis­tence of CCAJ, which also embo­dies a social uto­pia. To mark its 30th bir­th­day, Alain Bergala and Nathalie Bourgeois, the two key figu­res behind the pro­ject, are guests at LUCAS to pre­sent it in words and moving images. Vive le CCAJ!