Asian Festival of Children’s Content’s sixth iteration sees many firsts

To be held from May 30 to June 6, 2015 at Central Library (NLB) Plaza, Victoria Street, Singapore, the Asian Festival of Children’s Content (AFCC) returns for the sixth iteration this year with an expanded programme engaging creators, producers, distributors, and end-users of children’s content under one roof.

This year’s AFCC will host a total of 111 speakers, including 57 local speakers and 54 international speakers from 14 different countries around the world including the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Australia, Hong Kong, France, Malaysia, the Philippines, New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, Syria, Korea and Japan. Luminaries such as Rosemary Johnston, Professor of Education and Culture from University of Technology in Sydney, Australia and Dylan Yamada-Rice, Lecturer in Early Childhood Education from University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom will be presenting at the AFCC Teachers Congress, one of the festival’s regular tracks.

All the regular AFCC features such as the AFCC Writers & Illustrators Conference (ACWIC), the AFCC Media Mart & Book Fair, the AFCC Parents Forum, and the AFCC Teachers Congress are back again this year, but AFCC will also be offering several public and ticketed programmes for the first time. One such programme is Fun with Languages, which has been especially curated to enhance children’s learning of their mother tongues. This free-for-public, family-oriented programme features interactive activities in Singapore’s four official languages, English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil, in the form of performances, skits, story-telling and cross talks.

One of the highlights of this year’s AFCC Writers and Illustrators Conference is the comic track which offers topics such as “Comic Books: Social Media Marketing and Creative Entrepreneurship” by Evangeline Neo and Elbert Or from evaworks and Ateneo de Manila University respectively.

China is AFCC’s country of focus this year, with ten Chinese speakers. For the first time, the NBDCS will also be facilitating the collaboration between Singapore English authors and mainland Chinese authors by publishing a bilingual anthology of 16 of their short stories.

According to R Ramachandran, executive director of NBDCS, “In the 21st century, children’s content is about more than just books, so we are always on the lookout for relevant and innovative content to engage with the public as well as children’s content professionals. With the current emphasis on mother tongue languages, developing mother tongue and bilingual programmes such as Fun with Languages and translation master classes is a natural progression for AFCC.”

AFCC Media Summit (5-June) will feature conferences and workshops for professionals working on developing children’s content for different media platforms such as commissioning editors, screenwriters, authors, publishers, producers, television and movie executives, animators, and app and game developers.