Attendees at the Skyline Benidorm Film Festival will be able to access multiple titles with audio description through the Audesc Mobile app.
The festival and ONCE have signed an agreement to make the audio descriptions available on the app.
ONCE and the Skyline Benidorm Film Festival have established a collaborative agreement to make some of the festival's short films accessible with audio description through Audesc Mobile, a free app from ONCE that allows blind individuals to access audio descriptions of audiovisual content on mobile devices like smartphones or tablets, on both iOS and Android systems.
Furthermore, the festival will be responsible for producing the audio descriptions of the content and supplying them to ONCE for implementation and availability on Audesc Mobile.
The Skyline Benidorm Film Festival, which started in 2017 in Benidorm as a showcase of short films, has achieved great attendance success and recognition among directors, producers, and distributors. In its eighth edition, from April 13 to 20, it will include in-person activities, screenings, workshops to attract new young audiences, panel discussions, meetings with filmmakers, and industry days.
As part of the festival's activities, on April 15, a session on audio description in audiovisual content was held with 120 film students from San Juan de Alicante and Miguel Hernández universities in Elche. The short film 'If Thalia Were Blind', a production by ONCE that blends fiction and documentary with over 100 blind or visually impaired actors and actresses as protagonists in 11 theatrical pieces adapted to cinema, was shown. The students experienced the screening with audio description, observing the first half with blindfolds and the second without them, to better understand the audio-described details and the perception of a blind person. After the screening, a roundtable discussion was held.
