Building bridges through entertainment-education: How can a film be designed to challenge racial prejudice?

This present thesis examines the use of entertainment-education strategy in order to communicate social messages and bring about positive social change, specifically, to address and challenge racial prejudice. This thesis uses a specific case to demonstrate the use of the strategy and exhibit the different collaboration processes that take place during the design of an entertainment-education film. Namely, Beyond the River (Freimond, 2017) is put under the scope, which is a South African film that showcases the relationship of two people, coming from different economic and social backgrounds, who team up in order to achieve their goals together. The film is inspired by true events, which deeply affected the development of the film, and the collaborative processes taking place during. The theoretical framework is described within the boundaries of the field of entertainment-education, which refers to “the process of purposively designing and implementing a mediating communication form with the potential of entertaining and educating people, in order to enhance and facilitate different stages of prosocial (behavior) change” (Bouman, 1999, p. 25). It touches upon theoretic approaches already present in the field, inter alia, Bandura and Walters’ social learning theory (1963), Kelman’s classical identification (1961), Horton and Wohl’s parasocial interaction theory (1956), Bentley’s dramatic theory (1967), Gerbner’s view on cultivation (1998) and Petty and Cacioppo’s elaboration likelihood model (1986) are described and used for the analysis of the film. Furthermore, contemporary media studies further broaden the theoretical framework, with the study of Lutkenhaus et al. on spreadable media (2020), Jenkins’s view on participative media (2006), and Bouman’s (1999, 2020, 2021) and Singhal et al.’s (2013) view on the collaborative processes that take place in designing entertainment-education content. The analysis of the film is divided but interconnected by the thematic content analysis of the audiovisualized script of the film and the transcribed in-depth expert interviews obtained from six stakeholders who all played a decisive role in the process of designing the film. The analysis revealed the challenges and benefits of using the entertainment-education strategy in a film’s design, the intricacies of the collaboration processes between the social organization and the production company, and how the film is designed to initiate social change in not only South Africa but around the globe.