In the end of September 2024, Lab School Paris launched the Erasmus proejct WE RESiST – We Rethink Environmental Sustainability in Schools Together – in collaboration with Labyrinth škola Brno in the Czech Republic. Seventeen students and three teachers traveled from Brno to spend a week in Paris, where they worked alongside Lab School Paris students on a range of activities—from documentary filmmaking and songwriting to research involving students as co-researchers. We’ll be sharing more details of each activity in upcoming blog posts.
We are thrilled to announce that Flore Vasseur, the acclaimed director of the movie Bigger than Us, has agreed to support our initiative to inspire and equip students to take meaningful action against climate change, which was also inspired by her vision. Her involvement underscores the importance of empowering young voices in the fight against climate change and adds an exciting new dimension to our work together.
Documentaries can be used in two ways: first, as a powerful tool to educate students on climate-related issues, and second, as an engaging medium for students to express their own voices on the topic through filmmaking.
A recent study by Bieniek-Tobasco et al. (2019) reveals how documentaries, when done well, can break down complex environmental issues. The key, according to them, is to achieve a balance between emotion arousal and offering empowerment-focused messages and actionable insights without inducing helplessness feelings. This combination inspires audiences to act rather than despair, creating a sense of agency around climate solutions.
With this in mind, we organized a screening of Bigger than Us by Flore Vasseur at the Méliès cinema in Montreuil. The documentary highlights young activists worldwide who are on the front lines of climate justice and social change. Following their journeys, Bigger than Us exemplifies the powerful blend of imagery and efficacy described by Bieniek-Tobasco et al. (2019), moving beyond awareness to inspire students to recognize their own potential to drive change in their local environment. After the screening, we were joined by Dorothée Martin, the film’s first assistant director, who generously took time to engage with the students in a Q&A session.
Inspired by the film, students were then invited to document impactful climate actions within their own communities. Taking a cue from organizations like Schools for Climate Action (S4CA) and the United Nations’ Youth Climate Report Project, WE RESiST included a series of workshops introducing students to documentary-making. These sessions helped them planning to build essential skills – researching, storyboarding, shooting, and editing – while raising their awareness of environmental issues. They also had a chance to explore the history and diversity of documentary film through curated clips and discussions on aesthetic approaches of this genre.
Young filmmaker and editor Lou Dahlab led two introductory workshops. The first traced documentary film’s evolution, from La Sortie de l’usine Lumière (1895) to the contemporary works of directors like Frédéric Wiseman and Chantal Akerman. The second part explored how documentaries address ecological themes, with examples like La Rivière by Dominique Marchais. This presentation focused on the technical and creative aspects of documentary filmmaking—framing, editing, storytelling—while also raising questions around authenticity and the ethical choices involved in capturing reality. The materials from the presentation are available in our resource folder.
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