‘People need hope’: Dreamland, an inspiring documentary that brings a breath of fresh air

“A dream is proof that imagining, dreaming of what has not been, is one of the deepest human needs” Written by the great author Milan Kundera The unbearable lightness of existence. This belief is shared by five business school graduate students from Chartres, Gironde and the Paris region.

In 2021, while the world is still largely recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic, the idea of ​​encouraging young people to overcome their fears, dare to take risks and realize their dreams has become more concrete in the form of a documentary, Dreamland, which opens in cinemas this Wednesday.

How can we encourage young people to keep their dreams and make them come true? To answer this question, they went on a trip to meet young people from all over the world. From Panama to Italy, from Brazil to France via Denmark to Kyrgyzstan, no less than 18 countries on four continents will be visited, especially thanks to the generosity of the crowdfunding campaign launched in May 2021.

“Our idea for the trip was to meet authentic people and we made sure there were inspiring young people everywhere, so to find testimonials we just tried to meet people throughout our adventure.” says the collective.

“We spent an average of two weeks per country and tried to plan our next destination a week in advance. Among the solutions that worked to find people, we could use social networks and association networks. Sometimes we even met the interviewees. We had coffee right on the street and upon discovering their story, we decided to film their relationship.”

This “call for witnesses” was a great success: more than 240 people agreed to share their experiences; 120 were selected and photographed. All of these testimonies are conspicuously absent from the 80-minute documentary. An inevitable sharp choice.

“People need some hope”

Dreamland is not conceived or designed as a set of turnkey solutions for young people who share their experiences, happy or unhappy. Utopian dreams that are purely materialistic or sometimes philosophical, the desire for a fairer and less unequal world, or the thirst for culture and elsewhere, testimonies collide, sometimes at the cost of sad and painful observations.

Like this young adult, who lives in a very disadvantaged environment in Brazil, works in waste collection. “The state government does not provide the necessary support” he says. “CIt’s hard to fulfill your dream when you don’t have enough income. And in my case, it’s going back to college. “

It’s hard to build yourself up when you have no, or very few, structural criteria to follow. When poverty characterizes us and we live in families that try more to survive than to live. How can you dream when you have no money for treatment?

What also becomes clear is that this sequence, this collective consciousness and related initiatives, even though the task seems herculean, is done or will be done primarily in civil society, in the face of incapacity. Real or imagined, public authorities to bravely solve problems.