Aurélie, Maxime, Hélène, Emma, Romain come from Polytechnique, Sciences Po, Centrale or business schools. They could have landed a prestigious job and a big salary. But they chose to break with companies deemed too polluting and destructive capitalism.
For a year, Arthur Gosset, himself a student at Centrale Nantes, filmed the journey of these young people, their trial and error, their difficulties, their often painful experiences of desertion. Released in September 2021, the documentary Breakups gave rise to hundreds of screenings, particularly in major schools and universities.
“This documentary explores a fundamental movement. I met nearly 20,000 young people. At the end of the screenings, the debates are still lively. How to resist big salaries, company cars? We even have parents who come to thank us. Their children stopped studying, they didn’t dare talk about it. Thanks to the film, they understand better”, says the 24-year-old director, who, for his part, has given up a career as an environmental engineer.
Worried about growing inequalities and ecological devastation, revolted by a world of work that has not kept its promises of social progress, the young people of “Generation Z” who have grown up with the environmental crisis are questioning the very notion of career.
Should we desert or try to change the system from within? The debate is as old as slogans and barricades, but it is unfolding on an unprecedented scale on social networks. Seen by nearly twelve million people, the call for desertion made by eight AgroParisTech students on April 30, during their graduation, has become the symbol of the existential crisis of a fraction of this generation. As had been the speech of Clément Choisne, a young graduate of Centrales Nantes, in 2018, during an identical ceremony where he said “unable to recognize himself in the promise of a life as a senior executive, an essential cog in a capitalist system of overconsumption”.
“We are talking about a generation that saw its parents working all their lives in the same company, only to be fired by a simple email. Who saw his big brothers enter the business world with the desire to change it, but end up in burnout”unfolds Arthur Gosset.
In companies, the balance of power has reversed, and recruitment managers are confused, he continues: “Before, an engineer accepted a job for an electric SUV factory without asking too many questions. Today, he wants to know more about the manufacturing process, takes a critical look at the incentive to consume. The most committed go so far as to resign. »
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