Many teenagers are creative and their parents are unaware of it. And many could become so if the adults around them encouraged them. Smartphones and tablets are obviously their first tools. That is why, from the early 2000s, we encouraged creation festivals, as part of a festival we had called “the festival of the 4 screens”, meaning television, computer, tablet and smartphone screens. The name was sadly taken up by someone else, who along the way changed its meaning to focus on finding young talent… We now speak, more modestly and more realistically, of pocket film festivals made on mobile phones, because that tool has won out over all the others. Many towns have already set them up, but schools can do so too. The principle is very simple.
In September, a theme is launched. It can be abstract (such as freedom, citizenship, empathy…) or concrete (such as the window, the sea, pollution, the storm…). It is made clear that the “entries”, that is the films and photographs, must be handed in by January. In February, a jury meets and awards prizes, preferably many of them, so as to reward a large number of entrants and encourage them: prize for realism, prize for animation, prize for originality, prize for poetry, and so on. All the works collected, with the prizes awarded, are posted on a website that serves as a showcase both for the young people and for the institutions that organised the competition. It is of course possible to tailor the brief to the institution behind the festival. Why shouldn’t a school use such a competition to invite students to speak about their school, and to help enrich its website?
More generally, the aim of such festivals is twofold. On the one hand, it is to show adults the creativity that many young people are capable of. On the other, it is to give young people who sometimes struggle to find their place at school a space where they are valued. Let us not forget that adolescence is an age when it is easy to feel misunderstood, not to say unloved. To feel at home in the world, you have to be able to weave around your daily existence a cocoon of images and stories that lifts it, in your own eyes, out of anonymity and generality and gives it an original flavour, that of each person’s own hopes and dreams.
These creations made on a mobile phone or tablet are a way for them to speak out. In them they talk about their questions, their anxieties and their hopes, and they discover that others do it differently from them. These creations thus inspire exchanges and the discovery of the many possible points of view. This is what is called empathy, whose importance in the formation of moral sense we now know.
The 3-6-9-12 association is committed to promoting, encouraging and defending these initiatives.
