The Three Amigos team up with TVE Asia Pacific

Partnership will enhance multi award-winning HIV/AIDS package's outreach

TVE Asia Pacific is proud to announce the addition of the internationally acclaimed Public Service Announcement (PSA) series The Three Amigos to its international catalogue of development and humanitarian films.

The regional organisation recently signed an agreement with its producers to distribute the series of short comedic sketches, featuring three animated, talking condoms.

The 20 PSAs use comedy to deliver a serious message: entrench the use of condoms to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS.

The Three Amigos is a groundbreaking HIV/AIDS prevention strategy, strongly supported by Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who has called the PSA’s “a powerful communicating tool” to change behaviour. He has written an open letter to broadcasters around the world to “use these PSAs. They cannot be played enough”.

This campaign has received widespread acclaim.  The Three Amigos has already received over 25 international awards and competitive festival selections, including the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award in April 2007 "for its deceptively lighthearted and extremely effective attack on a deadly world epidemic".

The producers have made the amusing spots all the more appealing to TV stations and networks internationally by offering them in a variety of running times – as short as 15 seconds, as long as a minute – and in 41 different languages, from Amharic to Zulu.

For Asia Pacific, the PSAs are available in English (Canadian voices and Hong Kong voices), Bengali, Cantonese, Farsi, French, Hindi, Bahasa Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Philippino, Punjabi, Sinhalese, Tamil, Thai, Urdu and Vietnamese.

Acclaimed Canadian Director and Producer Firdaus Kharas directed and co-produced the PSAs together with Brent Quinn of South Africa. They worked with some 80 volunteers in Canada, India and South Africa to create this ground-breaking behaviour modification programme.

Firdaus Kharas says: “I am very pleased to be able to partner with TVE Asia Pacific, an organization that is doing so much to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. Through its extensive distribution network The Three Amigos campaign will get to be seen by millions of viewers in the Asia Pacific region. Lives will be saved.”

"We are thrilled to be able to distribute The Three Amigos in the Asia Pacific," says Pamudi Withanaarachchi, Distribution Coordinator of TVE Asia Pacific. "This series is an extremely valuable addition to our rich collection of titles on HIV/AIDS issues."

Launched in 2003, The Three Amigos have been translated to more than 40 languages with a grant from OMNI Television in Ontario.

TVEAP has been promoting The Three Amigos films for some years. The series was screened at the 2004 AIDS Film Festival that TVEAP organised during the XV International AIDS Conference in Bangkok, Thailand.

"We screened The Three Amigos every day, always to a packed house," recalls TVE Asia Pacific Director and CEO Nalaka Gunawardene. "Amidst the often depressing, long-format documentaries dealing with the death and misery unleashed by HIV (very much part of the HIV story), the animated cartoons livened up the audience — and showed that discussing HIV on television can be funny yet serious at the same time."

Read Nalaka Gunawardene's blog post: The Three Amigos: Funny Condoms on a serious mission

TVEAP will distribute The Three Amigos on a non-exclusive, non-commercial basis to broadcast, civil society and educational users across the Asia Pacific.

The producers have cautioned that these PSAs should be used as one component only in a comprehensive HIV/AIDS prevention programme. The PSAs will not be appropriate in all settings and in all cultures and careful evaluation of the appropriateness of each PSA should be made.