Colorful but Colorblind — Roma Beyond Stereotypes

November 3, 2010

Transitions (TOL) and its partners the Media Development Center (Sofia), the Center for Independent Journalism (Budapest), Memo 98 (Bratislava) and the Center for Independent Journalism (Bucharest) launched collaborative multimedia project Colorful but Colorblind on http://roma.glocalstories.org, a collection of 25 short films about Roma communities in new member states of the European Union in Central and Eastern Europe.

The stories were produced as part of an 18-month project aimed at remedying anti-Roma stereotyping through the creative use of multimedia in reporting minority issues. The project, which involves 50 journalists from Roma and majority communities in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, features both training and production components.

Leading specialists in multimedia storytelling and production from the School of Communication at the University of Miami took part in the project as trainers and producers.

Following week-long training seminars held in each country in May and June, the films were produced in July 2010, when the participants were divided into groups of two--most comprising one Roma journalist and one majority-community journalist--to work on a Roma-related story. Each team was joined by a graduate student from the School of Communication at the University of Miami. 

The project is co-funded by the European Union’s Fundamental Rights and Citizenship Programme, with further support from OSF Media Program, the Embassy of the United States in the Czech Republic and the Knight Center for International Media at the School of Communication, University of Miami.