Experiencing Interruptions?

Oyinbo Pepper

The physical appearance of persons living with albinism is often the subject of wrong beliefs and name calling. One of such slightful names is Whitey; another is Oyinbo Pepper.

As parents cope with this and visual impairments associated with the condition, Brien Holden intervenes with child health care solutions that empower children to access quality education.

  • OtoObong Ekpenyong
    Director
    If Only, Eno's Demons, Mo, Power to the People,
  • Jonathan Ogolo
    Cinematographer
  • OtoObong Ekpenyong
    Producer
    If Only, Eno's Demons, Mo, In a Jungle, Power to the People,
  • Anne Ebri
    Executive Producer
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Short
  • Genres:
    Human Interest
  • Runtime:
    10 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    June 12, 2019
  • Country of Origin:
    Nigeria
  • Country of Filming:
    Nigeria
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    .mov
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - OtoObong Ekpenyong

OtoObong Ekpenyong holds a Bachelor of Art in Christian Education and has produced digital content in faith-based organizations for over a decade. In the 2013 and 2014 Africa International Film Festival (AFRIFF) training sessions, he emerged one of the best in Sound for Film and Cinematography respectively and won the festival’s talent development scholarship in 2014. In 2015, he was one of 18 African filmmakers trained at Montana State University (MSU)’s Social Justice Documentary Filmmaking Workshop in Bozeman with funding by Ford Foundation.
In 2019, he was commissioned by Brien Holden Vision Institute to document this ‘Seeing is Believing’ child health care project in Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria in commemoration of International Albinism Awareness Day.

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Director Statement

The reoccurring challenge for me, whenever I am commissioned to document projects like this, is to find the story to tell. As noble and altruistic as these projects are, people are mostly not interested in sitting through the chronicling of such efforts - they find it boring.

Even though we were interested in how the respondents cope with an associated visual impairment (most people living with albinism also experience ocular albinism), each parent recounted a name-calling experience and so I chose to weave that into my storytelling.

The goal here, in commemoration of this year’s International Albinism Awareness Day, is to support the championing of rights of people living with such conditions. Name-calling is verbal abuse and should be treated as so.