Thanks to Vivendi Create Joy, five young French and five young American boys and girls will spend the summer living on either side of the Atlantic. Driven by a share passion for cinema, these ten youngsters will join forces and their talent to produce a movie and a documentary.

Aged between 16 and 25, these youngsters share one passion: cinema.

The 1000 Visages association, located in the Paris suburbs, strives to shine a spotlight on the various career opportunities offered by the cinema industry, via meet-ups with professionals, training sessions and the supervision of the collective direction of short films.

In Brooklyn, Reel Works Teen Filmmaking trains and guides teenagers who are interested by documentary-filming. Trained on a volunteer-basis by professional directors from the New York cinema scene, the teenagers cover topics that matter to them, such as the reality surrounding their teenage lives. Their work is then broadcast on New York TV stations.

These two associations are long-time partners of Vivendi Create Joy, which instigated the idea to set up such an exchange and meet-up. Since 2012, Vivendi Create Joy brings together its partner organizations to work on international projects. After the Orchestre à l’Ecole project (France), Music for Youth (United Kingdom), AS&I (Burkina Faso) and Binkad (Mali), Reel Works Filmmaking (USA) and 1000 Visages (France) have now joined forces to work together.

Ten youngsters have been chosen on either side of the Atlantic. Through the lens of videos, cinema, imagination and humor, they have all begun to create portraits of themselves, a parody of the stereotypes French people could entertain about Americans and vice versa. These virtual exchanges take place on a dedicated platform via which they develop the scenario of the movie.

During the month of August, five teenagers from Paris will fly for Brooklyn. They will discover the city, the teenage life, the habits, the dreams, the hardships… in short, everything that makes up the life of a typical teenager from Brooklyn! After that, the five Americans will arrive in Paris and will discover the French life, the metro, the baguette, the … Vivendi headquarters, the ‘French Touch’ and, once again, the real deal behind a typical French teenager’s life in Paris.

Together, they will produce a film and a documentary under the helm and guidance of the French director Holy Fatman.

Their work will be shared and broadcast in festivals, on TV stations as well as during discussion evenings in both countries.

The human dimension, beyond the cultural element, is clearly at the heart of this project. Funnily enough, after the first Skype calls and Facebook chats, it appeared that the biggest challenge of the project was not the language barrier, or the cultural difference, or misunderstandings, or diverging artistic tastes: no, the biggest challenge happened to be the time difference, which definitely made work sessions trickier to organize!

The Vivendi Create Joy program allows disadvantaged young people to find their path, to blossom and develop their talents by participating in projects built around music, cinema and creation. Vivendi Create Joy also supports around 30 projects in several countries (France, UK, US and several countries in Africa).