Asia Pacific VRCs adapt Children of Rio

2 Sept. 2003

The Children of Rio, a 54-minute special television documentary, was produced by TVE to mark the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) held in Johannesburg in August 2002.

A decade in the making, and nominated for major television awards around the world, The Children of Rio features the lives, dramas and dreams of six of the ten children born around the time of the Rio Earth Summit. TVE has been tracking their progress with regular visits and television updates.

The programme was the most prominent among a package of television programmes that TVE produced in 2002 to raise awareness on key issues discussed at the Summit. TVE produced the programme in collaboration with the Rapid Blue Production Company of South Africa, Siguy Productions of the UK, the BBC, PBS in the United States and WDR in Germany.

Without using the sustainable development jargon, and instead adopting an engaging story telling approach, the documentary conveys the essence of what sustainability and children's rights mean to individuals, families and communities in very different parts of the world.

In the months following the Summit, TVE Asia Pacific and its network of national partners have been promoting and distributing this programme across the world's largest region.

Additional funding support was raised to adapt the programme to several key Asian languages. Working with and through national partners in most cases, the Children of Rio has been versioned into Bahasa Indonesia, Chinese Mandarin, Tagalog (main language in the Philippines), Thai and Vietnamese. UNICEF East Asia and Pacific Regional Office (EAPRO) supported these versioning activities.

"These five versions alone will make this programme more accessible to a combined population of nearly 1.5 billion Asians," says Nalaka Gunawardene, Head of TVE Asia Pacific Regional Programme. "It is extremely important for us to offer our programmes in as many languages as possible in this highly diverse region."

The distribution and promotion of the Children of Rio in English and Asian languages continue. The programme is available for television broadcasters in developing countries on easy terms, without a licensing fee. Contact TVE Asia Pacific for details.

TVE Asia Pacific and partners are also distributing the programme on VHS and VCD to educational, training and civil society institutions. This distribution is on a demand-driven, cost recovery basis. Contact the nearest organisation of the Asia Pacific VRC Network for details.

The two-part programme, versioned into Chinese by Beijing Earthview Education and Research Centre, was aired on China Educational Television's CETV-2 channel in mid March. This was part of the six-times-a-week broadcast slot that Earthview has on CETV-2 beginning January 2003. Thanks to this satellite-beamed broadcast, Chinese viewers in over 100 million homes are able to tune into TVE's award-winning Earth Report TV series on global environmental issues. More about the Chinese broadcasts.

The Children of Rio In 1992, as decision makers prepared for the planet's largest ever gathering of politicians at the Earth Summit in Rio, TVE turned its back on the technocrats and environmentalists, and chose instead to focus on ten babies from around the world born in that year. The idea was very straightforward: if the Rio Summit was to mean anything at all to ordinary people, surely it would be reflected in the lives of the ten babies and their families? For a decade since 1992, TVE commissioned film-maker Bruno Sorrentino travelled the world every other year tracking the progress of these ordinary children. He has filmed in the developing countries of Brazil, China, Kenya, Papua New Guinea, South Africa and Venezuela; one economy in transition in Latvia, and three developed countries - Norway, the United Kingdom and United States. In 2002, on the eve of the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), TVE revisited the children to find out just what has changed in their lives in the decade since Rio and what does the future hold for them? A decade in the making, and nominated for major television awards around the world, The Children of Rio features the lives, dramas and dreams of six of the ten children. By 2002, they were ten years old and had their own stories to tell. Their personal stories, and those of their families and communities, present vivid video portraits about how countries in the north and south have been striving towards universally agreed sustainable human development goals. The trials and travails of these children illustrate the practical difficulties that nations, governments and societies encounter in translating international commitments into practical action. Executive Producer: Roger James for the BBC Director/Cameraman: Bruno Sorrentino Original concept: Robert Lamb, Executive Director, TVE Written & narrated by: BBC World's current affairs correspondent Rageh Omar The Children of Rio was produced by TVE as the editorially independent flagship production of the World Summit for Sustainable Development (WSSD), with co-financing from the BBC, the Johannesburg World Summit Corporation (JOWSCO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the European Commission (EC).

Source: TVE Asia Pacific