BRINGING DOWN A MOUNTAIN, 14min,. India
Directed by Subhashish Panigrahi
A rural village never wanted to be a city’s landfill or a distant blur in Reels but instead home to new imaginations.

This 2023 docu-fiction dissects the intersecting themes of access, abolition and caste through the experiences of residents of a rural village and that of a hyper-urban city. The film follows the village residents’ dreams—of mobile data, digital payment and relief from menial work. What happens when the landfill is full, and dreams want to break free?

While underlining that all digital barriers are social, the film exposes the plurality of tech innovations and challenges the extractivist and ableist tech.

Made through the Future|Money grant, Bringing Down A Mountain is centred around financial inclusion with a push and pull between caste abolition and Unified Payment Interface, a mobile digital payment system in India. It was premiered in November 2023 at the Interledger Summit 2023 in Costa Rica.

Director Biography - Subhashish Panigrahi

Subhashish Panigrahi is a non-fiction filmmaker and a public-interest digital archivist whose work depicts the role of tech and media in democracy, language justice, and abolition of caste, gender, and socioeconomic oppressions.. He has nine films and several other notable media works and awards to his credit. He is 2017 batch National Geographic Explorer, a 2023 DWeb Fellow, a 2019 Digital Identity Fellow at Yoti, and 2017 MJ Bear Fellow. He has served several civil society organisations such as Ashoka, Wikimedia, Mozilla, Internet Society and the Centre for Internet and Society in leadership roles for over 12 years.

With support from the National Geographic Society, he collaborated with speakers of several endangered and vulnerable languages, including the late Kusunda language elder Gyani Maiya Sen-Kusunda. The outcome, three award-winning documentaries including the eponymous Gyani Maiya, became linguistic resources for the speakers themselves apart from being showcased outside of the speaker communities. Gyani Maiya received widespread accolades such as the best screenplay award at the International Film & Entertainment Festival Australia 2022, 6th International Folklore Film Festival Thrissur 2023, Balkan Can Kino Athens, Bozok Film Festivali Turkey and Festival RNAB Sao Paulo. Subhashish went on to win the maiden Digital Identity Fellowship by Yoti in 2019 and make MarginalizedAadhaar, a documentary feature encapsulating the role of the Indian biometric ID — Aadhaar — in excluding marginalised groups. MarginalizedAadhaar saw a world premiere at re:publica 2021 Berlin. He has also discussed widely about his media practices in journals, books, blogs, podcasts, MOOCs, and keynotes.

https://theofdn.org/film/bringing-down-a-mountain/