Experiencing Interruptions?

Who Owns The Content?

This film is about the ownership of indigenous-language content? The narrator shares a real story of a Colombian young man who was orphaned at an early age. While he was away from home studying in a city, he found out about a a box of cassette tapes containing his late father's interview which were recorded by a researcher in Europe. The tapes contained folk songs and stories from the father's childhood. The young man thought it would be interesting to digitize the tapes and share them online, and he did that. Soon after his siblings saw the recordings online and they did not like the recordings going online. The question—who owns the content—is complicated. The narrator leaves the audience to wonder who it could be—the researcher who recorded them in the first place, the late father, the children, or the community themselves whose songs and stories are recorded.

  • Subhashish Panigrahi
    Director
  • Subhashish Panigrahi
    Producer
  • Eddie Avila
    Key Cast
    "Narrator"
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Short
  • Runtime:
    1 minute 28 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    July 15, 2019
  • Production Budget:
    370 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    India
  • Country of Filming:
    Colombia, Sri Lanka
  • Language:
    English, Spanish
  • Shooting Format:
    Image collage
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Subhashish Panigrahi

Subhashish is a community catalyst and documentary filmmaker who works at the intersections of Openness, digital freedom and storytelling. A National Geographic Explorer and founder of OpenSpeaks, he has a leadership career spanning over a decade in nonprofits like Wikimedia Foundation, Mozilla, Internet Society and the Centre for Internet & Society, he has helped grow over 40,000 volunteers across 40 economies in Asia-Pacific. He has been a keynote speaker, and has spoken in 50+ international conferences—including a UNESCO conference and many other high-level meetings—across 20 countries. Advocacy for Openness, empowerment of marginalized communities for their Internet rights, access and participation in the knowledge commons in their native languages, and knowledge equity have been a core part of his digital activism. As a multimedia storyteller he has initiated major media outreach, specifically for the youth and students across Asia-Pacific to contribute to movements like Wikipedia, Mozilla and Creative Commons.
Launched strategy for 300 Mozilla Asia Campus Clubs & user research in 20 top universities; Helped grow Mozilla’s product & community Diversity & Inclusion; and led program design & evaluation. Helped grow Wikipedia’s readership by > 60% (3x global reach), and participation from South Asia by 50% [~10% global growth]; Designed and launched Wikipedia Education Programs for 3600+ students; Educated 4000+ potential Wikipedia editors via 200+ outreach programs; Produced extensive Open Educational Resources (OER) in 7 South Asian languages; Helped relicensing 200+ copyrighted encyclopedic text of over 50 authors; Supported India’s first GLAMwiki (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) project to bring content about 300+ tangible cultural heritage on Wikipedia; Led a project for creating input tools, fonts and OER for Santali.
With initial support from National Geographic, MJ Bear Fellowship and Mozilla Open Leadership series, developed OpenSpeaks to build a wide array of open resources (OER, Open Source tools, open curricula & open data) to help underrepresented language speakers create independent digital media. Impact: media development and policy advocacy for nearly extinct languages like Kusunda; Strategy, technology and community building for Santali and Ho; Institutional partnership for Bonda and Gutob languages. He has been a volunteer leader in major global movement initiatives including Creative Commons, Wikipedia, Global Voices, Opensource.com, OpenGLAM and Wikitongues.
National Geographic Explorer, MJ Bear Fellow 2017, Winner of the 2015 Opensource.com People’s Choice Award and "Wikimedia Advocate and Expert 2016”, and long-time author/editor to citizen journalism collective Global Voices and its Lingua Odia.

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Director Statement

This is an experiment worth every moment as it was really fulfilling working for the first time with no filmed video whatsoever. I came up with a storyboard that was entirely different than what came out at the end. I am so glad that the narration that was recorded in an entirely different setting fit in so well.