Documentary film

Who Owns The Content

Permanent link: https://n2t.net/ark:15056/ofdn-f-000001

  • OFFICIAL SELECTION - 13th Native Spirit Indigenous Film Festival - 2019
  • Official Selection at Lift-Off First-Time Filmmaker Sessions 2020

About the film

During a panel at the Global Voices Summit 2017 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Eddie Avila, Director of Rising Voices, recounted the dilemma a young Colombian man faced after discovering a cache of cassette tapes. The tapes contained recordings of his late father, who was interviewed by a European researcher, but was hidden somewhere. The young man got really excited when the tapes surfaced after all these years. So, he thought it might be interesting to digitise the tapes and share them online, and he did that only to realise that he had made his own siblings upset. They did not approve of the fact that the recordings have gone online. The question Avila leaves everyone with is: “Who owns the content [in the tape]?” Is it the researcher who interviewed the late father and recorded those interviews in the first place, is the father who is no more around, or the children, or the community whose songs and stories were recorded?

“Who Owns The Content” made it to the “13th Native Spirit Indigenous Film Festival – North Americas” with a screening in London on October 12, 2019, hosted by Native Spirit Festival in collaboration with SOAS World Language Institute.

Official Selection at Lift-Off First-Time Filmmaker Sessions 2020

Credits

  • Narration: Eddie Avila, Director, Rising Voices (recorded during Global Voices Summit 2017, Colombo, Sri Lanka)
  • Director and producer: Subhashish Panigrahi
  • Music: Mayan trumpet played by street artist, recorded by Subhashish Panigrahi. CC-BY-SA 4.0 Sound effects from Freesound.org Harmonica.wav. kristinhamby CC0 1.0 crowd ext cheer encore spanish.flac. kyles. CC0 1.0 cassette open.mp3. gggtrew. CC0 1.0 Hip-hop_beat_1_95.wav.-zin-. CC-BY 3.0 drum, voices spanish.wav. macpator. CC0 1.0
  • Stills: Veethika Mishra & Subhashish Panigrahi from Museo de Culturas de Populares, Mexico City CC-BY-SA 4.0
  • Additional video: Audio Tape Rolling – Green Screen Animation. Nissim Farin. Footage Island. CC-BY 3.0
  • Produced by O Foundation. 2019. CC-BY-SA 4.0 International