Edinburgh Documentary Pitch/2
It is a public secret that most public broadcasters do not have a young audience. ”Young people do not watch television”, it is being said again and again when television people meet. They watch films, including documentaries, online, or they go to festivals or they download films. Some tv stations, like German/French arte, produce webdocs to reach the young, or they make interactive productions. Remains to be seen what results will come out of this at a longer perspective.
It was therefore refreshing to hear Catherine Olsen from CBC Canada inform the audience (a full auditorium, great to see) that the channel had an audience from 25-40. Less refreshing, however, it was to hear that the channel dubs all their programmes because the audience can not read subtitles. Well, they can, but they don’t do because they send text messages while watching/listening to the programmes. Multi-tasking!
I met a Scottish filmmaker later that day, who said ”I don’t want people to send text messages while my film is on television…”
The language issue, well, the ususal pattern: the channels that do subtitles and thus respect the work of the sound engineer on a film are the European. We are not Barbarians, said Wim van Rompaey from Lichtpunt in Belgium.
Photo from Scottish Amy Hardie´s “Edge of Dreaming”.
