Love Patrol
| Love Patrol | |
|---|---|
| Genre | soap opera, edutainment (HIV-AIDS) |
| Created by | Wan Smolbag Theatre |
| Starring | Noel Aru, Lucy Seresere, James Langdale, Annette Charlie, Bob Homu, Yvette Vatu and others |
| Country of origin | Vanuatu |
| Original language(s) | English |
| No. of series | 8 (7 filmed so far) |
| No. of episodes | 80 |
| Production | |
| Producer(s) | Wan Smolbag Theatre |
| Location(s) | Vanuatu |
| Release | |
| Original release | April 2007 |
Love Patrol is a ni-Vanuatu television series. It is the first ever locally produced television series in Vanuatu. Produced by Wan Smolbag Theatre with financial assistance from AusAID, NZAID and the Asian Development Bank, it is a soap opera with a serious message, intended primarily to educate viewers on the topic of AIDS. It also tackles "youth unemployment, police brutality and the hypocrisy of keeping youth uninformed about sex". UNAIDS reported that it explores "the growing issues of high rates of STIs among young people, high teenage pregnancy, lack of discourse on sex and risk taking behaviours in [...] Pacific communities". It has been described as an "edutainment" series.
A review in the Fiji Times explained that the series
The series is written by Jo Dorras, and directed by Peter Walker, with Danny Phillips as cinematographer. It stars Noel Aru,James Langdale, Lucy Seresere, Annette Charlie, Bob Homu, Yvette Vatu, Elsie Apia, Morinda Tari, Danny Marcel, Titus Taripu, Florence Vira, Albert Tommy, Betio Albert, Charleon Falau and Gloria Lango. Each episode lasts about 21 minutes.
The first season premiered on television in Vanuatu and in Fiji starting in April 2007, and contained ten episodes, focused on Elizabeth, one of the main characters. It has subsequently been broadcast in the Cook Islands, Kiribati, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Tonga and Tuvalu, with plans to distribute the series on DVD throughout the region. In New Zealand, the first season was broadcast on Maori Television from May 2008. In Papua New Guinea, it was broadcast on CHM Supersound channel. In Fiji, it was broadcast by Fiji TV, which then conducted a survey and found that "up to 15% of the whole population watched the whole series". Subsequently, season 1 was translated into French by the Secretariat of the Pacific Community, and released on DVD under the title L'Amour sous haute surveillance.
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Wikipedia