Filmmaker Chris Chong (third left) shares the art of creating a story board with participants.
Groups preparing for the final presentation during the workshop.
Participants share stories as part of the narrative exercises.
KINABATANGAN: The Borneo Eco Film Festival (BEFF) recently kicked off its SUARA 2013 Community Filmmaking programme by organising a four-day community filmmaking workshop at Kampung Batu Puteh, near here.
Professional filmmaker Chris Chong and professional creative writer Melissa Leong were at the field to help the participants discover story-telling through filmmaking, specifically in exploring the narrative concept and ways to look for inspirations and ideas.
Fifteen community filmmakers took part in the workshop; three representatives of the local communities of Pinapak (Pitas), Alab Lanas (Sook), and Soguon (Tongod), two representatives from PACOS Trust, and five representatives from the HUTAN-Kinabatangan Orangutan Conservation Programme (KOCP) and the Batu Puteh Community Ecotourism Cooperative Ltd (KOPEL) respectively.
‘Suara’, which means ‘voice’ in Bahasa Melayu, is BEFF’s year-round training programme which encourages indigenous and local communities to express their own “voices” through the use of film, telling their own stories in their own words and images. SUARA 2013 is supported by SEDIA, as the main SUARA presenting partner and the Krishen Jit Astro Fund.
The SUARA programme supports community filmmakers from all over Sabah to make a series of films which will be screened at the annual Borneo Eco Film Festival, set for September 27 to 29 this year.
This is done by providing workshops and talks not only during the festival but also during year-round training sessions held at their respective communities.
The Borneo Eco Film Festival is an annual event celebrating Borneo’s biocultural diversity through showcasing environmental films and nurturing local community filmmaking efforts.
The festival includes a series of community filmmaking workshops and ecological talks with exclusive premieres of local and international documentary films and is free and open to the public, to be held at the Kompleks JKKN, in Kota Kinabalu.