A Young Filmmaker Explores Her Fascination for the Sea

Paris-based Camilla Mazzocchi, an Italian-Colombian-American Young Filmmaker, travelled to Monaco for the recent launch of the WIKI Centennial Expedition. While there, she discovered her passion for the Mediterranean inherited from her father's love of the sea. Part of HelpSaveTheMed’s Young Filmmakers’ initiative, Camilla is among a group of young volunteers seeking to encourage greater public attention for resolving the threats facing the Greater Mediterranean.

If you were to recount your earliest memory, could you do so truthfully? Perhaps your answer relies on a photograph of yourself as a tiny human, or a fabrication of a series of images constructed to accompany your mother's favourite moments of your early life. How much of our identity is built on these fallible memories? (See Global Geneva article on the launch of the expedition)

I once theorised that parental care exists, in part, to provide a continuous history during infantile amnesia, bridging the gap before our own cognitive faculties arrive. Science debunks this: the quality and length of parental care depends entirely on the species' development at birth; humans are altricial, meaning that we're born categorically unable to manage on our own. In addition, while the causes of infantile amnesia are still being examined, a primary factor is that before eighteen months, infants do not have the ability to store language. It is a good thing, then, that my story begins with a feeling, not a word.

Veteran filmmaker Tom Woods, founder of the WIKI Centennial Expedition, presents some of the Young Filmmakers at the May 4 2026 launch of this multimedia initiative

The Mediterranean: A first encounter with passion

The wind. The instinctive raising of hands to ears. The realisation that a hair tie and sunglasses are your most essential tools (and maybe a wetsuit if you're brave enough). Watching my father windsurf on the Côte d'Azur is one of my earliest memories. His devotion was my first introduction to the Mediterranean and humanity's relationship with nature. It was also my first encounter with true passion.

Every Christmas, we drove 835 kilometres from Rome to Hyères, an old, hilly town east of Toulon. We stayed in a Pierre & Vacances town home from Christmas Day until the Epiphany, sometimes longer if strong winds were forecast. For a windsurfer, the world map is redrawn: landlocked regions are greyed out, while notoriously windy coasts and lakeshores are circled in red. I suspect our resort only stayed open during this off-season because of bookings from families like mine. My father saw beauty in the water when everyone else considered the sea to be at its least appealing.

Editorial Note: HelpSaveTheMed's WIKI Centennial Expedition is a multimedia and educational initiative of the Swiss-registered non-profit, Global Geneva Group. Consisting of concerned groups and individuals, including experienced media professionals who serve as mentors, it seeks to highlight threats from climate change to the erosion of cultural heritage sites facing the Greater Mediterranean and the world's oceans - but with an emphasis on solutions. The Young Filmmakers and Youth Writes programme is designed to help young people improve their communications skills and to become more aware. You help by supporting this crucial endeavour.

In the Mediterranean, seasons shift without competing for centre stage, allowing us to hop from the French Riviera in winter to the Adriatic in spring, the Aegean in summer, and the Tyrrhenian in autumn. This sounds like a magnificent way to spend a sabbatical, but for my father it was the tracing of a path to follow the wind. Hyères was optimal in winter, with December gusts averaging 13 knots. Conversely, the mid-August holiday of Ferragosto, originally a Roman rest period, offered a tactical window to chase the Aegean Meltemi winds at their annual peak.

For most of my childhood, I didn't mind moulding my life to fit my father's passion. It fostered a deep sense of belonging to the Mediterranean, not just to its marginal seas, but to the people and customs inhabiting its shores. While my father surfed, my mother, sister and I explored coastal cities. This is how Galette des Rois became a staple on our Christmas table, and why we looked forward to the luminaries of Salento in April.

Elephants don’t belong in the sea

As much as I loved my father's approach to travel and leisure, I didn't quite understand it. I couldn't see how battling the wind was a remedy for a gruelling week in pharmaceutical marketing. Over time, his insistence that my sister and I take up a water sport began to drive us apart, proving that you can't force a child to love your own dream - especially during the teenage years. As a teenager it became clear to me that windsurfing was just an exercise in frustration: a logistically heavy, weather-dependent ordeal that required hours of setup and considerable expense. It felt less like a passion and more like a form of insanity. My sister eventually took to kitesurfing, and while my father was overjoyed, he kept hoping I'd come to love the sport as much as he did. Fate, however, had other plans.

In 2016, job opportunities pulled our Mediterranean life towards the Atlantic. We relocated to Miami, and my father marked the occasion with a kitesurfing session, minus the wetsuit. The Florida water is far too warm for the gear he'd spent years compulsively packing in the Mediterranean. I was 12 by then, and going to the beach to watch my father and sister kitesurf or windsurf had lost its appeal. Now that my sister had joined my dad in the water, my only companion during these seaside outings felt like a giant elephant in the room, a constant reminder that I didn't share my father's passion. In a way, I felt I was holding it back from going further. I didn't like the feeling, and elephants don't belong at the ocean.

Many of the Mediterranean's cultural heritage sites, such as Tipasa in Algeria, are under threat

UNESCO

The Young Filmmakers & YouthWrites Programme

It wasn't until I joined Help Save The Med's Young Filmmakers programme (which includes the YouthWrites initiative) that I reconsidered my father's passion for the sea and felt empowered to find my own. I met Tom Woods, the founder of HSTM, in February during a masterclass at Cinestudio Paris, where I have been studying since September 2025.

Tom shared insights from his fifty-year career in media, but it was his latest mission that truly resonated: a three-year expedition around the Mediterranean aboard a 106-year-old sailboat named Wiki. The mission appealed to me instantly, taking me back to a childhood rich in natural and cultural exploration, largely thanks to the Mediterranean.

Young Filmmakers aboard WIKI

Keep it simple: Tell a good story

I didn't expect Tom to be scouting for a new generation of media professionals to document the challenges and solutions facing the Mediterranean. Yet three months later, four students and one alumnus from Cinestudio joined him in Monaco to help turn his dream - and now ours - into a reality. We accompanied the team through the launch of Wiki's Centennial Expedition, where Tom's expectation was simple: tell a good story.

As with any storytelling medium, this begins with context. As Wiki prepared to depart, we researched the micro-state's history both beforehand and while on location, to understand its place in our journey. Beyond what the Principality is mainly known for, such as Formula 1 and the Monte Carlo Casino, Tom challenged us to view Monaco through the lens of Wiki's age. We dived into archives to see the port as it existed a century ago, questioning how the landscape has shifted and whether past generations can guarantee the same culturally rich sea that Wiki once witnessed. We knew we were headed in the right direction when I found a 1953 quote by Prince Rainier III: "Monaco's future belongs to the sea." For a moment, I thought I was reading one of Tom's own words.

This vision led to the founding in that same year of the Yacht Club de Monaco (YCM), which reached a milestone in 2014 with its new headquarters designed by Lord Norman Foster. This land-bound ship is a feat of sustainability, utilising solar power and seawater-based cooling. More importantly, the YCM's 2,500 members from 82 nations create a strategic crossroads for marine preservation. Wiki was fortunate to inaugurate her expedition at the YCM, and once we had found the stories of Monaco worth telling, we got down to filming.

My father always taught me never to sail alone: if no one else is in the water, you stay on shore. Windsurfing may be a solitary sport, but you still rely on others to gauge the wind conditions, recover your board if you lose it after a jump, or help you back to shore if the wind suddenly drops.

Aboard Wiki, I found a similar reliance within a remarkable documentary team. Director Tom Woods, sound engineer Lenny Jensen, and writer Edward Girardet once collaborated as a trio to report from the Middle East in the late 1970s and 1980s. While today's industry has largely collapsed those three roles into the job of one person, our time in Monaco called for a return to that collaborative approach. My fellow filmmakers and I coordinated every detail: assigning specific focal lengths to vary the scale of our shots and ensuring full coverage between speakers, audience reactions and the atmosphere of the venue. Though we each managed our own rushes and soundbites, we worked as a single team to capture the full momentum of Wiki's expedition launch.

HSTM also helped me finally understand my father's passionate obsession with water sports. Camera operating is physically demanding work. You're on your feet all day, managing heavy gimbals for stability, constantly adjusting tripods and carrying a lens pouch for quick swaps. You are also frequently switching out ND filters to handle changing light between indoor and outdoor scenes.

The most challenging part was carrying all that equipment from the Yacht Club of Monaco up the steep hills to our base in Beau Soleil. Even so, I have no cause to complain; it's genuinely impressive that modern, portable technology allows one person to do what once required a crew of three. My realisation was that the weight and the setup time don't actually matter. Just as my dad cares only about riding the wave despite the hassle of his gear, I found the work itself to be the reward. I'd gladly climb those hills again without a second thought if it meant capturing the start of this mission and the hard work of our team and partners one more time.

Young Filmmakers and school children aboard WIKI

Empowering the next generation

I believe HSTM is a worthy expedition because it empowers the next generation to protect the Mediterranean's cultural and environmental legacy, preserving the region in the state that Wiki has documented. Looking back, it makes perfect sense that I chose filmmaking as my vocation. The Mediterranean is too important a part of our world to leave undocumented. Through Help Save The Med, we aim to provide a definitive visual record, ensuring that the vibrancy of this sea is never lost to the fallibility of memory.

Camilla Mazzocchi is a 22-year-old film student with Italian, Colombian and American roots. Before moving to Paris to begin her cinematography studies at Cinestudio, she completed a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations at Florida International University. She plans to pursue a career in media production or film journalism.