As a 1st year student of Digital Film Production, I have never considered photojournalism. I primordially centred my focus towards the art of storytelling by exclusively staying on the film ambit. This is an amazing opportunity to optimise the time for me to explore another way of telling stories through a visual medium. Conceiving the idea of storing reality through physical memories, externalises the mundane remembering desire. History would not have existed, if people forgot they did.
The first human settlements in Madagascar occurred between 350 BC. and 550 D.C. for the Austronesian people, who arrived from Borneo in rudimentary batangas. Five hundred years later, they were joined by Bantu immigrants who crossed the Mozambique Channel. Other groups continued to establish themselves in Madagascar with the passage of time, each making a significant contribution to the culture of the island. The largest ethnic group on the island is Malagasy, an ethnic group that is often divided into 18 or more subgroups, the largest of which is the merina of the central highlands.
For much of its modern history, Madagascar was a colony of France, a country that left an indelible mark on the culture and traditions of the island. Madagascar obtained its total independence from France in the summer of 1960, but French remains one of the official languages of the country, along with Malagasy, the most widely spoken language in the country.
The Malagasy language is spoken in Madagascar and is the mother tongue of the vast majority of the population. The language is the only one in the region of Africa that belongs to the family of Malay-Polynesian languages. Language specialists believe that Malagasy shares a common origin and is more closely related to the Manyan, a language spoken mainly in the southeastern part of Borneo. Both the Malagasy and the Manyan are very similar to the languages of the archipelago of western Indonesia, such as the Malay, the Javanese, the Balinese, and the Minangkabau language of Sumatra.
The majority of Malagasy people live in rural areas, where their lifestyle and political environment are still very traditional, and where most decisions are still made through a council of elderly men. There is a growing number of young people in Madagascar who are against these traditions. Seeing little economic future in their rural villages, these young people have become the main source of rural migration to the largest cities in the country.
COLLECTING MUSSELS
Credits:
Chaimaa Ormazabal