On the last day of “Critical Lens” Outdoor Cinema sessions, a group of young people joined at Saline 34 backyard to watch and discuss the film “Don’t Look Up”.
The film humorously shows the attitude of the media and the public towards a fact that meteor will hit the planet Earth in the next few months and wipe out the human race itself. It concerns the inability of the media and the political elite to adequately deal with this event, in the context of the logic of the market and the desire to ingratiate themselves with the widest audience, which is not even ready to seriously discuss the possibility of a meteor impact on the earth.
The aim of the activity is to shed light on various topics, from climate change to democracy and the role of mainstream media in contemporary social life, through joint reflection and discussion.
At the very beginning, the participants were introduced to the concept of the Critical Lens: outdoor cinema project and discussed the motivation for their participation. They talked about this format as a significant opportunity to expand knowledge on relevant social topics.

Photo: Mariana Matoso
After the end of the movie, the participants were divided into two groups to simulate a debate related to the plot of the film. They used role-playing as a tool in a structured debate format, where half of the participants were the scientists and the other half was the public and media and they had to impersonate these arguments. Not only throw playful acting participants developed empathy bus also reflecting on how easy it is to create nonsense arguments without any factual base we could reflect on how important is critical thinking when debating issues, argumenting and coming to conclusions and forming opinions.
At the end of the session, they came to the conclusion that film is a reflection of a wider society and culture in which the focus is on the most banal motives and passions of the wider audience, and where the voice of experts is very difficult to reach an insufficiently informed public.
This activity was developed within the frameworks of projects Young Demo (P. Nº:SEP-210833021) and EU4Youth2Act (P. Nº:2023-1-IT03-KA220-000154855 ), co-funded by the European Union through the Erasmus+ program and CERV program.
