‘It’s our voice’: Youth-led participatory filmmaking as activism, care and co-creation in the ATTUNE project

This article examines youth-led participatory filmmaking as a form of creative activism, care and situated media production within the UKRI-funded ATTUNE project, which explored the impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on young people’s mental health. While participatory media methods are often presented as empowering, questions remain about who holds authorship over narrative, aesthetics, editing and dissemination. Drawing on interviews with young filmmakers and analysis of films produced by the youth film crews created by the project in Oxford and Kent, we argue that ATTUNE offers a model of youth-led production that extends, but does not simply replace, co-production. Young people were not only invited to contribute stories; they shaped the tone, form, visual style, emotional framing and imagined afterlife of the films. Their work used humour, informal footage, metaphor, non-linear structure and behind-the-scenes material to resist medicalized, deficit-based and adult-authored accounts of youth mental health. At the same time, the article problematizes the language of ‘safe space’, showing safety as negotiated, relational and dependent on facilitation, consent and ongoing ethical care. We situate the findings within broader debates in participatory filmmaking, visual ethnography, critical pedagogy and activist media practice, arguing that youth-led filmmaking can function as both a process of collective care and a cultural intervention into how young people’s experiences are made visible.