Mental Health and Cinema - Experiencing the World Through Images

On April 14 and 15, 2026, ACRIF, as part of its coordination mission for Passeurs d’images in Île-de-France, is organizing two days of professional meetings at Le Trianon cinema in Romainville (Seine-Saint-Denis) on cinema, image education, and young people’s mental health.

I co-designed the program and content for the first day with Diane Olivier, Passeurs d’images Île-de-France coordinator, based on groundwork proposed by Claudie Le Bissonnais, and I am facilitating it. The second day is co-organized by ACRIF with Cinémas 93.

Click here to register.

Detailed Program

A space for exchange between health and cinema professionals, these meetings offer a reflection on the roles of films and cinemas, between “watching” and “making,” in order to better welcome, listen to, and raise awareness among young people.

Day 1 — Young People, Their Images, Their Spaces: New Paradigms?

Morning — Cross-perspectives on young people’s mental health today
9:30 AM - 12:30 PM

What are we talking about when we refer to “young people’s mental health”? By bringing together three perspectives from the clinical field, socio-demography, and cultural practices, the discussions will focus on the concrete realities of young people’s mental health: symptoms, causes, vulnerability factors, and territorial specificities in Seine-Saint-Denis.

Building on these observations, we will deepen the reflection by exploring the potential of cinema and image education practices as tools to address these challenges. We will notably address the “mission drift,” where culture, education, or youth work professionals find themselves confronted with situations of psychological distress without always being prepared for them.

The morning will conclude with a written contribution session, inviting participants to share their feedback, questions, and proposals in order to fuel collective reflection.

With:

• Olivier Duris, clinical psychologist and lecturer at Université Paris Diderot
• Catherine Embersin, socio-demographer and research officer at the Île-de-France Regional Health Observatory
• Benoît Labourdette, filmmaker, pedagogue, researcher, and cultural innovation consultant

Facilitated by Benoît Labourdette

Afternoon — Participating: Creating With, Creating Together
2:00 PM - 5:30 PM

What approaches should be adopted in mediation and collective creation to take mental health into account, both in processes and in the conditions of welcome and the place given to participants? How do we address this issue without being specialists? How do we approach mental health without “mental-health-ifying” it?

To reflect on these questions, a participatory photography workshop invites participants to explore mental health through the image, followed by a sharing session focused on perspectives and interpretations.

Cross-perspectives from a cultural project coordinator, a social worker, a filmmaker, and participants, with a feedback session on a filmmaking workshop conducted with adults suffering from psychiatric disorders.

With:

• Anne-Sophie Charpy, Passeurs d’images coordinator at Normandie Images
• accompanied by Amaury Voslion, author, filmmaker, and photographer
• and Adèle Colange, coordinator-facilitator at the Résidence Accueil Séraphine in Rouen
• as well as Océane Paquin, Océane Badji, Vincent Boivin, Jérémie De Saint Léger, Germain Filezac De L’Étang, Albin Legendre, Pierre Marchand, participants in the filmmaking workshop

Day 2 — The Possibilities of Cinema: A Refuge Space?

Morning — The Cinema as a Place of Welcome
9:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Drawing from several experiences in cinemas and film festivals, this morning will be an opportunity to collectively reflect on how cinema professionals can better welcome young people without being caregivers themselves, and how health professionals or carers can better approach and support cinema outings.

Starting from the notion of the spectatorial journey in a cinema, from access to information to the collective screening experience, this morning will address communication, welcome, and mediation challenges. Concrete avenues for adapting practices will be proposed: establishing partnerships between cinemas and health structures, inclusive communication tools, attention to sensory environments, the approach of welcome and mediation teams, and the design of adapted cultural projects. We will end with a practical session of designing a group cinema screening to collectively reflect on practical tools and approaches to adopt.

With:

• Julie Guégan, head of communication and mediation at Le Trianon Cinema in Romainville
• Nicolas Revel, director of L’Étoile Cinema in La Courneuve
• accompanied by Charlotte Serrano, doctor at the Salvador Allende municipal health center in La Courneuve.

Facilitated by:

• Claire Mayot, journalist, designer, and facilitator of the meetings within the framework of the À la folie festival
• Léna Nilly Urbaneja, project officer for distribution, cinema training, and communication at Cinémas 93.

Afternoon — Mental Health on Screen: Representations and Programming
2:00 PM - 5:30 PM

What should we program together? How can the programming workshop be a fertile space for developing a shared perspective? What does hands-on engagement through the workshop enable?

The association Étonnant Cinéma has been leading and coordinating, for many years, practice and visual literacy workshops for various audiences. They will present their work through two workshops: one with young adolescents from L’Entracte-Hôpital Avicenne-Bobigny, the other with people receiving RSA benefits.

Interview with Nicolas Philibert about his film Sur l’Adamant (2023). What representations of mental health does cinema offer us? How was this film accompanied and received?

With:

• Clara Ipparaguirre, general delegate of Étonnant Cinéma, filmmaker, and cinema facilitator, accompanied by Bénédicte Loyen, filmmaker and cinema facilitator, and Denia Benguedda, participant in a programming workshop
• Nicolas Philibert, filmmaker

Facilitated by:

• Maxime Bouillon, cinema mediator at ACRIF
• Diane Olivier, Passeurs d’images Île-de-France coordinator at ACRIF

Who are these meetings for?

These meetings are aimed at a broad and deliberately intersectoral audience: cinema and cultural mediation professionals, but also educators, social workers, local health contract coordinators, psychologists, youth workers, and teachers. This diversity is the wager of the approach. Young people’s mental health issues cannot be resolved within a single professional field. And cinema has the quality of offering common ground — the image, the narrative, the shared emotion — where professionals who do not usually cross paths can speak to one another.

These meetings come at a time when the national context is favorable: mental health is a major national cause in 2025 and 2026, the Mental Health Information Weeks in October 2026 will have the theme “For our mental health, let’s open up to the arts,” and the national strategy for developing psychosocial skills, signed by eight ministries in 2022, identifies culture as a lever. Now is the time for culture, cinema, and image education professionals to position themselves clearly: not as auxiliaries of care, but as actors of positive mental health.

• Registration link
• These meetings are organized by ACRIF / Passeurs d’images Île-de-France, in partnership with Cinémas 93, with the support of the Île-de-France Region, the CNC, the FDVA, and the Seine-Saint-Denis department.
• Contact: Diane Olivier, Passeurs d’images Île-de-France coordinator: olivier acrif.org

I share here the reflections that nourished this co-construction, in the hope that they may be useful beyond the event itself.

Three words, three misunderstandings

The first day starts from a simple observation: the words “mental health,” “images,” and “young people,” increasingly paired together in public policy, carry considerable misunderstandings. And these misunderstandings have direct practical consequences on how projects are conceived.

• Mental health, first of all, is not mental illness. Santé publique France distinguishes three dimensions: positive mental health (well-being, the capacity to act), reactive distress (linked to life events), and psychiatric disorders. When the three are conflated, everything gets medicalized. Yet most professionals who work with young people — cultural mediators, youth workers, teachers, educators — are not caregivers, and should not have to become ones. But they increasingly find themselves confronted with situations of psychological distress for which they lack the tools. This is what we might call “mission drift”: a widespread phenomenon, rarely named, that affects virtually every sector in contact with youth.
• Images, next, are not “screens.” There is a considerable gap between passive consumption of content and the active creation of images. When a young person makes a film, a photograph, a staged scene, they are not consuming: they are symbolizing. They are giving form to an experience, constructing meaning, inscribing themselves in a shared symbolic space. This is the distinction between image education — which belongs to art, creation, symbolization — and media and information literacy. We are here in the realm of art.
• Young people, finally, are not a homogeneous audience. Social inequalities in the face of psychological suffering are massive. Seine-Saint-Denis is the youngest department in metropolitan France and the poorest. The wait for a place in an IME there is eight to nine years. These territorial realities are not a backdrop: they are determinants of mental health as weighty as individual factors. And young people are not merely carriers of symptoms. They are also producers of meaning, culture, and resistance. This reminder is not rhetorical: it changes how one thinks about a project.

Why cinema?

The question that guided the construction of these meetings: what does the cinematic experience, in the broad sense — seeing and making images — specifically bring to mental health challenges, and in particular for young people?

My hypothesis, after more than twenty-five years of pedagogical practice with very diverse audiences, from the PJJ to art schools, is that image creation acts on what the World Health Organization calls psychosocial competencies: self-awareness, emotional regulation, empathy, communication, critical thinking. Not because it is decreed, but because the very process of creation engages these abilities. When you make an image together, you negotiate, you listen, you accept that the result escapes its author. When you look together at what you have produced, the others’ perspectives on my own production help me legitimize it — I who gave it no value.

But there is a prerequisite, and it is perhaps the most important point of these meetings: before working on the psychosocial competencies of young people, we must work on our own. On our own relationships to images, our own judgments, our own vulnerabilities. This is a principle I discovered concretely in the work I carry out with the PJJ and the DRAC du Limousin around psychosocial competencies and cultural practices: the professionals’ psychosocial competencies come before those of the audiences. If I myself am not able to name my emotions when facing an image, how can I support a young person in doing so?

The first day: young people, their images, their spaces

The morning establishes a shared framework for reflection: what is young people’s mental health, concretely, in Seine-Saint-Denis? What are the warning signs, territorial specificities, determinants? And how can cinema and images serve as levers? The morning brings together three perspectives: that of Olivier Duris, clinical psychologist and co-director of the university diploma in art and therapeutic mediation at Paris Cité, who works daily with adolescents in a day hospital; that of Catherine Embersin, socio-demographer at the Île-de-France Regional Health Observatory, who provides field data; and mine, from the standpoint of creation and artistic pedagogy. The format is not three successive lectures but a thematic dialogue, where each question is addressed collectively drawing on these complementary areas of expertise.

The afternoon shifts to the concrete reality of practice. I begin by offering a participatory photography workshop, inviting participants to produce, in small groups, a staged photograph on the theme of young people’s mental health. The sharing session follows a protocol I have practiced for years: the authors are not allowed to speak; the others express what they see and feel. It is a moment where one concretely touches the polysemy of the image and the recognition afforded by the gaze of others. Then, the screening of a short documentary made as part of Passeurs d’images in Normandy, with people living with psychiatric disorders, opens a discussion with Anne-Sophie Charpy, the project coordinator, filmmaker Amaury Voslion, the coordinator of the Résidence Accueil Séraphine in Rouen, and several participants in the film themselves. The question running through this afternoon: how do we take mental health into account in creative processes without being specialists? How do we approach mental health without “mental-health-ifying” it?

The second day: the cinema as a place of welcome

The second day, co-organized by ACRIF with Cinémas 93, shifts the focus to the cinema itself. How can cinema professionals better welcome young people without being caregivers themselves? How can health professionals better approach and support cinema outings? The morning addresses these questions through concrete experiences from cinemas and festivals in the area. The afternoon explores programming: what to program together, and how can the programming workshop be a space for collective elaboration? The association Étonnant Cinéma presents its work with very different audiences, and an interview with Nicolas Philibert about Sur l’Adamant examines the representations of mental health that cinema offers us.