Filmed in close collaboration with the Vanuatu National Museum and Cultural Center KASTOM KOPIRAET shares its process shaped by the Center’s protocols. In Vanuatu, foreign filmmakers cannot film without such authorization. The Center created them in the wake of the country’s independence as a strategy to (re)appropriate control over its community’s representation.

Kopiraet, in Bislama—the pidgin language of Vanuatu—refers to “native copyright” or collective authorship. The film initiates conversations about copyright grounded in earlier footage. These exchanges address the ownership of artworks, performances, knowledge, and documentary, across colonial histories and present practices. In doing so, the film questions the power structures that shape how images made by Western filmmakers cycle back to the source communities.

KASTOM KOPIRAET hereby reflects on its copyright within the unequal dynamics between the Global North and South. Acknowledging its own contradictions, the film deliberately leans into them rather than resolving them. Through this embrace of ambiguity, it reflects on questions of power, authorship, and the politics of image-making.