The Terrassa film school is chosen by the American streaming giant to benefit from the fund it has launched to promote inclusive creativity, endowed with one hundred million dollars
Redacció TheNBP
25 april of 2022 at 14:13h
The Escola Superior de Cinema i Audiovisuals de Catalunya (Escac) has been one of the centers selected by Netflix to participate in its inclusive creativity program, an initiative that seeks to promote diversity in films and series in order to ensure that there are no longer underrepresented social groups in audiovisual media. Thus, two screenwriting students from Escac will be awarded scholarships by the Fund for Inclusive Creativity created by the American streaming giant, with a budget of one hundred million dollars that is expected to be invested over the next five years.
The new Escac-Netflix screenwriting scholarship will cover, for the 2022-2023 academic year, the cost of tuition and registration fees for the Master’s in Screenwriting, as well as financial aid to cover accommodation and living expenses during the months the study program lasts, the acquisition of computer and technological equipment, and travel expenses to Terrassa, where Escac is based. With this agreement, the prestigious Catalan film school expands its scholarship program, from which 100 students with limited resources currently benefit each year.
According to Escac, the creation of the screenwriting scholarship aims to “help make the audiovisual industry a more inclusive and diverse sector, through the search for new perspectives and narrative proposals from social groups underrepresented in audiovisual media.” The goal is to promote creative equity and encourage the presence of people with cultural diversity, with sexual and gender diversity, and/or with disabilities behind the cameras, so only people who identify with one of these underrepresented identities will be eligible for these scholarships. The scholarship winners, after passing the selection process, will be announced next July 6.
According to Ted Sarandos, co-CEO and chief content officer of Netflix, the Inclusive Creativity Fund seeks to “invest in the next generation of diverse storytellers” and its main mission is to help the company reduce the on-screen representation gap for groups historically underrepresented due togender, race, sexual identity, or disability. To monitor progress in this area, Netflix presented a study last February conducted by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative on series and films broadcast by the company from 2018 to 2019. “The report makes it clear that, although Netflix has made progress in terms of representation year after year, we still have a lot to do,” Sarandos states.
According to the study,inclusion behind the cameras —that is, diversity among screenwriters, directors, and producers— exponentially increases inclusion in front of the cameras. “Both issues depend on Netflix executives who commission these stories also being diverse,” says the senior US executive.
Of the 22 inclusion indicators analyzed for films and series, 19 showed improvements from one year to the next. “We are ahead of the rest of the industry in hiring women and women of color to direct our films, and female creators to bring our series to life. In addition, we have achieved gender equality in leading roles in films and series,” Sarandos points out.
“We have also surpassed —he adds— the proportional representation of Black protagonists, co-protagonists, and main actors and actresses in the two years examined. But not all racial or ethnic groups experienced an increase in representation during the period covered by the study. We still have significant representation gaps, with respect to the US population, in series and films for Latino, North African or Middle Eastern, Native American or Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian or Polynesian communities. And we still have a lot to do to increase the representation of the LGBTQ community and characters with disabilities.”
To accelerate the process of inclusion and diversity, Netflix plans to invest one hundred million dollars over the next five years, both in external organizations with a solid track record in preparing underrepresented communities for success in the film and television industry, and in customized Netflix programs that help the company identify, train, and hire promising professionals from around the world.
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