Two San Diego middle school students won first-place in C-SPAN’s annual student documentary competition this year. Helena de la Houssaye and Harper Haden from Correia Middle School will receive $3,000 for their documentary exploring ties between the “No Kings" protests and the country’s founding.
This year participants were asked to focus their work around America’s 250th anniversary and the Declaration of Independence. When C-SPAN announced the topic, Haden thought of the No Kings movement because she said advocates now have similar concerns surrounding personal freedom as the Founding Fathers did. She had recently attended a No Kings Protest in downtown San Diego with her family and friends.
“If you think about it, the Declaration of Independence was a No Kings movement in and of itself,” Haden said. “It was the American colonists saying that they wanted to cut their ties with Britain, and that they didn't want to be ruled by a monarchy.”
De la Houssaye and Haden said they wanted to choose a subject that’s relevant now and has a local impact. Their interviewees included San Diego County Sheriff Kelly Martinez and Vice Chair of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors Monica Montgomery Steppe, plus an organizer of the local No Kings protests, as well as attendees, and a San Diego American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) representative.
“We want to make sure that people are aware of their rights, that, not the government, no one can take their rights away from them,” de la Houssaye said. “Also everybody has the freedom of speech, everybody has the freedom to protest. And all of our interviewees stated just that.”
Interviewees throughout the documentary emphasize the importance of exercising First Amendment rights. Both students hope it will show people that they can do the same and make a difference.
Haden and de la Houssaye entered the competition through a school project in their English and history class, taught by Stacey Tinsley and Keri Clark. Clark said they center a project around the annual competition if the topic is relevant to what they’re teaching that year.
Clark said the groups work on their projects for about five weeks, followed by a class watch party and the option to submit their work to C-SPAN. Other teachers and the students’ families all help throughout the process.
“They’re our future leaders,” Clark said. “They just need to know that their voice — they have a voice and that it matters.”
De la Houssaye and Haden are eighth graders now, and this was their second year entering the C-SPAN competition through the class. Last year, their documentary on the effects of fentanyl crossing the U.S. border with Mexico received second prize honors.
For both of them, the 2025 competition was their first time ever making a documentary. Haden and de la Houssaye met in kindergarten and have attended all of the same schools, but they said making two documentaries together has brought them much closer.
“We realized that we had kind of similar work ethics, we were both overachievers, we tried really hard in school,” de la Houssaye said. “So we decided that, ‘oh let's do this documentary together because we believe that with us together, we can create a documentary that will hopefully outshine.’”
Now de la Houssaye and Haden have both discovered a love for filmmaking. In the fall they’ll move on to high school and will still be able to enter C-SPAN’s competition.
The annual C-SPAN StudentCam competition is open to students in grades 6-12 across the U.S. Each year, students are challenged to explore an issue that affects their community and the nation through a five- to six-minute documentary.
Three other documentaries from Tinsley and Clark’s class won prizes this year. Josie Connor and Mia Martin’s film about the Writers Guild of America strike and Celeste Stout’s project on United States v. Virginia were awarded third prize honors. Myla Hannah and Elsa Elkovitch received an honorable mention for their documentary on gun violence.
“Everybody was happy for everybody,” de la Houssaye said.
Haden added, “it's really nice to see that when one person does good, it's like the whole class did good, and everyone's excited and everyone's congratulating everybody and it's really cool.”
Haden and de la Houssaye’s documentary titled “This Is What Democracy Looks Like” will air on C-SPAN on April 17.
