By Africans About Africa
A budding filmmaker embraces an opportunity to tackle inequality in her society with her chosen art form.
This film records a beneficiary's experience of the MONTANA STATE UNIVERSITY 2016 Documentary Filmmaking Workshop.
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OtoObong EkpenyongDirector
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Tunray FemiWriter
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Nancy CornwellProducer
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Project Type:Documentary, Short, Student
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Genres:Documentary
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Runtime:9 minutes
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Completion Date:July 25, 2016
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Country of Origin:Nigeria
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Country of Filming:United States
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Language:English
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Shooting Format:1080p/25 .mov
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Film Color:Color
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First-time Filmmaker:Yes
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Student Project:Yes
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Montana State University Social Justice Documentary Film WorkshopBozeman, Montana
United States
July 17, 2016
Workshop Final Screening -
iRepresent International Documentary Film FestivalLagos Island, Lagos
Nigeria
March 24, 2018
African Premiere
Official Selection
OtoObong Ekpenyong 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 Montana with funding by Ford Foundation. In 2016, while chaperoning 13 other Africans to the same workshop - which he also served as teaching assistant, he directed this short documentary; 'By Africans About Africa' - themed around the essence of the workshop.
We toyed with a number of ideas, including producing a sort of travelogue, but the subject matter of Africans telling African stories emerged as central and that’s what we stayed with. Stories are creative constructs and may be attempted by any storyteller but only Africans can tell African stories with the realism that make them truly authentic.
I had gone through this training experience myself just the previous summer and, knowing how empowering it was to my filmmaking career, I wanted to capture this experience from the point of view of a participant in a way that will make a compelling case for the relevance of such genre specific trainings - especially for filmmakers of African descent.
My hope is that this piece will strengthen conversations around empowering filmmakers to turn their cameras on issues of social import. If the filmmaking community in Africa is going to produce compelling documentaries, then the requisite genre-specific trainings such as the AFRIFF/MSU Social Justice Documentary Filmmaking Workshop should be provided.