Young culture reporters

The Young culture reporters in Avignon project, set up by the Festival d'Avignon and the Ceméa since 2014, offers young Avignon residents the opportunity to become familiar with digital technology, the Festival and their city. On the programme of this immersion, supervised by professional journalists and Ceméa facilitators:

• Discovering the Festival through its programming and its jobs, editorial committee, filming on location, practicing interviews, editing and encoding.

• Learning to understand, practising criticism, defining a point of view are some of the major stages of teamwork.

Each week tells a little more about the collective intelligence and power of the artistic gesture.

Find all the videos of the Young Culture Reporters project - Web-TV

During each edition, the Festival organises three independent 5-day sessions for young people between 11 and 20 years old, primarily from our partners in the educational and social field.

On the programme of this immersion, supervised by professional journalists and Ceméa animators:

Discovering the Festival through its programme and its jobs, editorial committee, filming on site, interviews and video editing. Learning to understand, practising criticism, defining a point of view are some of the main stages of teamwork. Each week tells a little more about the collective intelligence and power of the artistic gesture.

Registrations will be open from 1 March to 1 May 2024 for the three sessions in July 2024 (booking e-mail address at the top of the page):

• From 3 to 7 July: for partner REP/REP+ secondary schools

• 10 to 14 July: for young people aged 11 to 15

• From 17 to 21 July: for young people aged 16 to 20

The videos thus produced were shown at the Cinéma Utopia on 23 January, 2016, and during the 69th and 70th editions of the Festival, the young culture reporters were happy to welcome, on the Supramuros site of the Avignon Université, Najat Valaud-Belkacem, Miniter of Education and Research, and Audrey Azoulay, Minister of Culture and Communication, and more recently in the Palais des papes, Françoise Nyssen, Minister of Culture, as well as his successor Franck Riester. Those exceptional encounters were also captured on video.

After the terrorist attacks of November 2015, and to prepare our “What does the Republic mean to you? Let’s listen to youth” day, the Festival d’Avignon wanted to create a one-week programme for young culture reporters to accompany them with an act at once creative and critical.

From 4 to 8 January, 2016, 13 teenagers from the collège Anselme Mathieu and the lycée Philippe de Girard, who had already taken part in the Young Critics in Avignon programme, picked up their cameras again to produce videos about themes such as the Republic, citizenship, laicity, and freedom of speech.

The five videos they created during that week were shown on 11 January at the FabricA and served as an anchor for the debates that followed.

Here’s a glimpse at those videos:

• “What does the Republic mean to you? – Self-censorship?”: an interview with cartoonist na!,

• “What does the Republic mean to you? Freedom of speech”: an interview with journalist Nora Hamadi,

• “What does the Republic mean to you? Blasphemy”: an interview with journalist Nora Hamadi,

• “What does the Republic mean to you? It’s not nice to be mean”: an interview with Mimoun Bellazghari, Muslim chaplain at the Avignon-Le Pontet jail, and Brother Baudouin of the Brotherhood of Saint John,

• “What does the Republic mean to you? The Republic that brings us together”: an interview with Frédéric Monier, professor of contemporary history.

Within an international context that requires some keys to understand what’s going on, the Festival d’Avignon opened the doors of the FabricA to another civic project. “What does Aleppo mean to you? Youth talking with artists” is a way to try to understand the news, but more than that, History.

To prepare the operation of 23 January, 2016, a week of journalistic residence allowed the students of the lycée René Char in Avignon to work on their use of media and to meet a political specialist, an archaeologist, artist, and to listen to testimonies from many exiles.

The five videos they created during that week were shown on 23 January at the FabricA and served as an anchor for the debates that followed.  

Here’s a glimpse at those videos:

• “What does Aleppo mean to you? – Syria’s long history”: an interview with Corinne Castel, archeologist and research director for the CNRS,

• “What does Aleppo mean to you? Questions about the Syrian conflict”: an interview with François Burgat, political specialist,

• “What does Aleppo mean to you? Media blackout”: an interview with Roméo Langlois, international correspondent,

• “What does Aleppo mean to you? A lost land”: an interview with sculptor Khaled Dawwa,

• “What does Aleppo mean to you? Words of exile”: an interview with Z’urbains, drama workshop of the Maison pour tous de Champfleury in Avignon, who collected and read the testimonies of Syrian families.