Our Mission
WATCH. DISCUSS. ACT.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.
Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
— Margaret Mead
“Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.”
— Nelson Mandela
“An informed citizenry is the basic requirement for our survival as a free people.”
— Thomas Jefferson
We live in an age of entangled crises, what Edgar Morin call the polycrisis.
A storm made of many storms.
Each feeds the next: climate collapse, disinformation, war, inequality, the erosion of truth itself.
They twist together, faster and fiercer than our old tools of understanding can manage.
But in every darkness, there is a crack of light.
And Europe stands, uneasily, courageously at the crossroads.
In 2012, before the word polycrisis had entered our lexicon, we saw it coming.
The Wake Up Europe campaign was born from that premonition.
Founded by myself, a filmmaker, journalist, activist, and Bill Emmott, former editor of The Economist, we recognised the signs of an age shifting under our feet.
The comforts of the postwar order were fading.
Democracy, we feared, might wither not in a bang, but in the slow forgetting of what it means to be free.
The first task, then, was to awaken.
To help citizens see the shape of what was coming, and to believe they could act.
But how does one awaken a continent, when complexity numbs, and populism shouts louder than truth?
We turned to what we knew best: journalistic documentaries as civic awakening.
A great documentary does more than inform.
It pierces.
It moves.
It lingers.
It brings the abstract down to earth, into faces, into voices, into stories that stay with you long after the credits roll.
It offers not just facts, but meaning.
And the data agrees.
A global study by the Oxford Reuters Institute found that documentaries are the most powerful medium for raising awareness on climate change.
More powerful than headlines. More powerful than speeches.
Because they speak to mind and heart at once.
Since 2012, Wake Up Europe has taken that power across the continent.
We’ve held hundreds of screenings and debates in places of learning, Oxford, Cambridge, Eton, the EUI, LUISS, Ca’ Foscari, and in places of governance, city halls in Finland, the Italian Parliament, and many more.
In 2019, our Wake Up Europe Festival unfolded in Turin, and across ten cities and ten urgent themes.
In 2024, to coincide with the European parliament elections, in partnership with the European Commission Representation in Italy and the Europe Direct Network, we sailed along Italy’s coast, screening the spectacular documentary Blue Carbon, by Nicholas Brown, to ignite conversations on how the sea, our oldest element, can be a new force in fighting climate change, and how the EU Green Deal can help leverage our continent shared technology and research to achieve that.
And in 2025, in partnership with the Florence European University Institute, we created Visioni d’Europa: six great films, six crucial challenges, six moments of shared reflection and dialogue, welcomed warmly by the city and embraced by 900 citizens.
As the crises gather speed, so must our response.
We need new civic rituals, where reflection replaces reaction, where story fuels solidarity.
Not top-down, but citizen-led.
Not abstract, but embodied.
That is our mission:
To turn a screening into a spark.
A discussion into a ripple.
A room of strangers into a shared civic moment.
We invite you, citizens and leaders, students and teachers, activists, parents, artists, dreamers, to host your own Wake Up Europe events.
No gathering is too small.
No viewer too young or too old.
Each conversation is a seed.
Each story is a map back to the values we must defend, freedom, equality, dignity, compassion, and truth.
Europeans have risen from ruin before.
We’ve rebuilt beauty from ashes.
We’ve chosen hope over hate, light over silence.
We can do it again.
Together.
With resolve,
Annalisa Piras
Director
The Wake Europe Project
