SAN PABLO CITY, Laguna”•The Movie and Television Review and Classification Board joined forces with SM Cares and San Pablo City to hold an audience-empowering event”•a special movie screening for blind and deaf students.
The special movie screening took place at Premiere Cinema, SM City San Pablo last Jan. 23, attended by more than 350 participants, mostly students from the the Pagibig at Pagasa and Arc Angel Intervention School. The blind and hearing-impaired children and special kids were treated to an exclusive cinema experience.
The participants, many of whom were accompanied by family members and teachers, enjoyed the animated film “Frozen,” which was presented with both closed captioning and audio descriptive features.
Key visual elements were supported by detailed audio narration, while sound was mirrored by text lines of both dialogue and scene description.
MTRCB chairperson Toto Villareal emphasized that through the special event, the second in three years, “our blind and hearing-impaired brothers and sisters are given equal opportunity and access to media content.”
The initiative, he added, comes at the right time due to the recent passage of the closed captioning law for television championed by former MTRCB chairperson and now Senator Grace Poe.
While it is now in the process of drafting the implementing rules and regulations for that law, Villareal said the MTRCB looks forward to more legislative innovations in the near future, such as requiring closed captioning for cinema and video as well as extending descriptive audio, when economically feasible, to television and optical media materials.
