Euro-Mediterranean Collaboration Experiments in Children’s Audiovisual Production

2 December 2015. From 18:30 | Conference | English | IEMed, Barcelona

In some ways, sharing content for young children across borders is easier than doing so for adults. Dubbing works better with animated characters than live ones, which is why US-based conglomerates are able to distribute cartoons for children all over the globe. But how easy is it to share other genres with children too young to read subtitles? And what about cross border collaborations not involving giant US media companies? Evidence shows they can be done successfully – sometimes so successfully that US giants want to join in.

In the Euro-Mediterranean region, although collaboration between the media dates back a long time, joint work in the media for children and adolescents has stood out for its rarity. It emerges that there is a greater diversity of governmental and non-governmental players on the European side than on the Arab one, a phenomenon exacerbated by conflict and political instability across the region. Yet those challenges make collaboration in this area ever more urgent. This conference assesses the causes and what would be needed for the situation to change.

Naomi Sakr is Professor of Media Policy at CAMRI at the University of Westminster and Director of CAMRI Arab Media Center. Prior to her academic career, she was a journalist and analyst. She was a principal investigator of the research project on pan-Arab television for children. Her research interests are media, journalism and cultural production policies in the Arab world. Sakr is also the author of Transformations in Egyptian Journalism (2013), Arab Television Today (2007) and Satellite Realms, among others: Transnational Television, Globalization and the Middle East (2001).