INPUT / … / … / Personal dramas seen in their cultural context

The topic of finding one’s own identity is a theme for television fiction all over the world. But how does fiction reflect the specific environment it came from? How is it received by the audience it is made for and what does it intend to provoke in the audience? What shape does it come in? What exactly links a story to a specific place? How does it work for other audiences? How important is the production process? And what is the duty of public service broadcasting when it comes to all of this? Three TV-dramas from the United States, South Africa and Japan show how diverse the answers can be. The US-production portraits three generations of women in Jordan. Could you have produced this film in Jordan, where it was shot? Is it a duty of public service broadcasting to do stories from other countries because native filmmakers can not? The South African drama series about gay men has had very controversial reactions from its audience, but the second season has found its way to a primetime slot. What did they change? How are they going about ‘training audiences to be accepting of homosexuality’? The Japanese film crew insisted on shooting their film in Oganawa, disaster zone in 2011 and the setting of the Japanese teen drama, to understand the feelings of the people that live there. How can a TV programme correctly convey the feelings of disaster survivors? And how did this film manage to have a cathartic effect?