Producing Documentary Films on Indigenous and Other Local Cultural Knowledge

Though this problem is too large for any single project to offer a comprehensive solution, this project can offer a useful contribution towards a solution.  The continuing erosion of relevant traditional practices in Agusan del Sur, and the Philippines, in general, signals the need to intensify cultural revitalization efforts through face-to-face transmission between elders and youth, and through media documentation. Film documentaries, in particular, represent an effective way to promote cultural awareness to the youth in a way that is accessible and empowering for both the local and viewers and the featured culture and arts experts.

This project will produce four documentary films, each of which will run for 1 hour and will focus on one of the following inter-related topics:

 	
Agusan del Sur's Traditional Musics: This film will explore musical instrument-making and performance, as well as oral chants/histories learning, creation and performance among several groups in Agusan del Sur.
 	
Agusan del Sur's Traditional Medicines: This film will document the local plant medicines and hilot (traditional massage), as well as the some of the spiritual practices surrounding the use of each.
 	
Agusan del Sur's Environmental Knowledge: This film will explore the cultural, historical, and spiritual significance of physical environments in Agusan del Sur, particularly the Agusan marsh and a holy mountain.
 	
Agusan del Sur's Understandings of Gender: This film will examine cultural models for women empowerment and gender equality that are currently being advanced by indigenous and rural women in Agusan del Sur.

Once the films are produced, they will be shown to the communities that have been featured in the films, as well as to schools and other cultural spaces in Agusan del Sur and Mindanao. The films will also be screened in other parts of the Philippines as well as overseas when the Tao Foundation’s officers conduct lectures and other events.  The beneficiaries of the project are: 1) The youth of Agusan del Sur youth (in-school and out of school) who are increasingly alienated from their own history, ecology, and cultural traditions, and as a result, lack confidence in their capacity to become agents of social transformation; 2) The cultural elders of Agusan del Sur who have been marginalized for so long by the colonial, elite nationalist, and global orders, and whose traditional knowledges have been dismissed as unimportant; 3) Agusan del Sur's schools and cultural institutions that need culturally-rooted materials for teaching.