“My goal is to find a stable job that I like, without having a boss who yells at us all day long. Tiffany is 19 years old and benefits from the Youth Guarantee, a state aid scheme for people between 16 and 25 years old. The entry criteria for this system were relaxed in February 2021, as the difficulties have multiplied, with the health crisis, for young people seeking to enter the professional world in 2020.
In Bas-Rhin, the department where Ilan Teboul’s documentary was filmed, unemployment among people under 25 (in category A) increased by 10% in 2020, according to figures from Pôle emploi and the management of the coordination of research, studies and statistics (Dares).
The director went to Alsace to follow the journey of a dozen “dropouts” – there are nearly 500,000 each year in France. He put his cameras at the local mission of Molsheim (Bas-Rhin), upstream of the working valley of the Bruche, half an hour’s drive from Strasbourg. Dozens of young people receive intensive job search support.
Believe in yourself
Teenagers whose director captures, without voice-over narration, the moving journey towards adulthood. They are all between 17 and 20 years old and already have trajectories damaged by school failures, family conflicts, sometimes sexual violence. When they arrive at the local mission in Molsheim, some have not left their rooms for more than a year and only visit their families on a daily basis. Succeeding rhymes with leaving, in a way. But this first departure is already part of the expedition: without a license, one has to take three buses, another gets up at dawn and ends her night in her mother-in-law’s car…
Breaking inertia also means accepting to reveal oneself in the collective workshops of the local mission, daring to disturb, overcoming the shame that one draws from one’s precariousness or the violence that one undergoes. Simply believe in yourself. “When I wanted to study photography and my math teacher told me that I could never make it with my average and that I would have to do a pro commerce baccalaureate instead, I listened to her. And I’m sorry,” says Sandra, in a collective theater workshop. “I know I’m spouting an astronomical amount of bullshit,” 17-year-old Dorian says.
Mobility, exclusion, break with the world of work, the director shows as much the impasses of certain relationships of domination of adults towards young people as the modest path of these towards others to “remake society” and take their independence more serenely.
