Young Audiences

From our catalogue of experimental films (more than 1,500 films) we offer “turnkey” short film programs organized around a theme and adaptable to all audiences (from 3 to 25 years old). We are available to provide mediation for these programmes. This mediation aims to welcome and accompany the possible reactions and interpretations of experimental works by children in a perspective of education to images. We can also provide pedagogical sheets to help animators in the mediation of the screenings.

We are also available to create customized programs, in partnership with the organisations that invite us, in order to constantly reinvent the relationship between young people and the images, and to offer activities and programs that are always varied and original. We are also regularly invited for “cartes blanches”, which we are always delighted to programme and animate. Do not hesitate to contact us for any request.

Some of our films are available in film prints, so we propose 16mm and super 8 projectors for rent, in order to provide young audiences with an entertaining and exiting experience, as well as a better understanding of the origin of cinema.

Finally, our catalogue offers many films accessible to young audiences, as well as a few films made by young filmmakers under the age of 18. It remains available to programmers who wish to offer programs for young audiences.
We are currently working on a tag to distinguish these films within our catalogue. In the meantime, we remain available to guide you in your programming choices.

Filmmakers from the Collectif Jeune Cinéma offer workshops exploring the various practices of experimental and different cinema, from film to video, from image recording to intervention on film… The workshops can last one afternoon in addition to a programming session, or they can extend over several days in the form of a long artistic intervention, with a final restitution of the project.
The workshops are designed according to the specificity of each audience, and can evolve according to the needs of the host structure.  

The description of the different workshops proposed by the CJC’s cooperating filmmakers is available in our Cahiers des Actions Culturelles, available for download below. New ones may be added as the filmmakers’ practice evolves and as particular structures request them. Please do not hesitate to contact us for any request, we can put you in contact with the filmmakers to work with them on specific projects.

Since 2015, the Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris has been offering a call for films open to filmmakers under the age of 15, and inviting them to submit their most free, inventive and experimental films. This approach responds to a desire to value and legitimise the individual and free cinematographic creations of children, and to value a different type of cinema that is constantly renewing itself under the eye and camera of the youngests. Their works are constantly demonstrating that their cinematographic imagination is still far from being invaded by the dominant visual models. Over the past eight years, the -15 section has shown more than sixty films and followed a significant number of aspiring filmmakers.

During the Festival, the films sent in are then viewed and selected by a jury also made up of young people between the ages of 10 and 18 approximately, former participants, young people from partner associations or simply enthusiasts. Finally, the selected films are then presented at a screening led by the young juries, which takes place at the Grand Action cinema during the Festival. The most experimental session of the entire Festival!

Each year, at the end of the Festival, some of the selected films enter the catalogue of the Collectif Jeune Cinéma. We believe that children’s cinema needs a place in the distribution circuit of experimental and different cinema, and we wanted to give it that. We are therefore working on their distribution and promotion, and regularly propose them for programming for young audiences and adults.

Since the 22nd edition of the Festival, the poster for the call for films has been created by the Applied Arts students of the Lycée Albert de Mun, supervised by Gwenola Desseaux.

In 2021, for the CJC’s fiftieth anniversary, the Festival is inaugurating a new 15-17,9 category, to allow a greater number of young people to participate. Open and international, it is aimed at teenagers and young adults and is placed under the same banner as the -15 section : decolonisation of the imaginary, valorisation of any creative gesture that overflows, disrupts or breaks the canonical models of filmic formats. During the 23rd edition of the Festival and the creation of this category, the call for films was a real success with the 15-17,9 with more than 40 films received. It was therefore continued for the 24th edition of the Festival and resulted in a sucess : around 60 films received. 

The session is also programmed and animated by a youth committee, and it also takes place at the Grand Action cinema during the Festival, following the -15 one. 

Every year since 2004, the Festival has offered one or more screenings for young audiences, in order to highlight the films in the catalogue that are suitable for young people, and to promote the idea, within the Festival itself, of experimental and different cinema that is accessible to all. This session is often an opportunity to explore the Festival’s themes from a different angle.

In 2022, the Festival is inaugurating a new session for high school and unversity students. The aim of this session is to guide young adults, whose eyes are often already (too) well trained, towards a  different kind of cinema. With this session, we want to get them out of the habit and renew their view of cinema(s) in order to open a discussion with them on the image - its formats, its ambitions and its possibilities.