When they turned off the lights, I felt like in a cinema. And then, a candle lights up on a screen. YouthMappers' documentary is just half an hour long, but packed with interviews and powerful imagery. It's not as much about what YM do — yes, they save the world, one building and power pole at a time, — as about who they are. Students see that a simple act of making a photo, or adding a road to the map, suddenly brings a change they can see. And that inspires them to do more: teach others, pursue map-related jobs, run projects. Again I felt a bit envious there was nothing like that when I was a student.

The documentary is built around a single issue, electric networks. No wonder it was chosen: seeing people study by whatever light they can find feels otherwordly for a european, in a bad sense. Like, this needs to be fixed yesterday. I liked that the movie was not about violence, as humanitarian messages sometimes are, but about learning and making a better future through maps. Feels empowering: not "ugh good thing there are trained people for that", but "wow I'd like to help".

This is a good short movie made by a director who knows what she's doing, and featuring voices and knowledge of all the key people of YM. Probably the first that shows OpenStreetMap at the forefront. Watch it in a month or two when it's published. Here's the trailer. Picture above by Gregory.