Maarifa: the first pilots will be arriving shortly!
A year after Maarifa was launched, how much headway have the selected projects made? Here's a progress report on the production of the educational programmes Chaabab Café , by Palestinian TV channel Wattan TV, and Al Oulamaou Assighar (Little geniuses ), by Jordanian TV channel JRTV.
With
France Télévisions and the Arab States Broadcasting Union (ASBU), and under the aegis of the Cultural Council of the Union for the Mediterranean, CFI launched a project to support TV channels from the Arab world in the production of educational audiovisual programmes, "Maarifa", in 2010.
Two of the selected projects are now reaching pilot stage:
Chaabab Café and Wonderkids.
The first,
Chaabab Café (Where the young ones hang out) , by commercial Palestinian TV channel Wattan TV, is a ground-breaking programme directed "by and for" young Palestinians aged 17 to 25.
Since end 2010, CFI has organised five expert assignments with the Chaabab Café teams, catering to chief editors, producers, reporters and web designers and focussing on how to draw up an outline, hunt for a location, make reports, choose a presenter and set up the multimedia aspects of the project. The programme will be broadcast from a café in Ramallah where young people like to hang out.
At a cultural crossroads, they like to smoke the hookah while surfing on Internet.
For Wattan TV, it's a way to reach out to young people, rather than putting something static together in the studio. During the last assignment, led in September 2011 by author and director Auberi Edler, the team shot the pilot, covering the role of social networks in daily and political life.
The TV channel has also developed a website which will include comments received via Facebook and Twitter.
The second programme project,
Al Oulamaou Assighar (Wonderkids) , by Jordanian TV channel JRTV, is targeting younger viewers, children aged 8 to 12, and covering various themes: discovering monuments, little experiments in physics and chemistry, interviews, recipes etc.
Since September 2010 it has benefitted from four assignments with CFI experts, led by Voyelle Acker, in charge of talk-shows for young people at France Télévisions. An Art Director for Big Gamble Erwan Breuil also worked with JRTV on writing and casting the children to present the programme and dispensed tips for the studio set. Lastly in September 2011, Karima Hamzaoui, free-lance director and journalist, and web-designer Stéphane Pachot joined the team to finalise shooting and the creation of the website, since interactivity and multimedia are central to the Maarifa project.
The pilot for this creative and innovative programme will be ready for airing in October.
