Bazaar Cinema: Re-purposing Media and debating cultural rights of Youth Communities in London and Mumbai

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Digital technologies have in the space of two decades changed the way in which media is produced, distributed and experienced. Yet the implications of individuals taking official media (such as film), re-making it in their own fashion and distributing it to their peers or more making it more widely available online, have been publically debated through a narrow lens in terms of legal stakeholders. This has resulted in statements prohibiting certain uses of film in particular, and yet the issue of cultural rights, of how we are able to engage with culture in the public domain, is an equally important framework. A legal definition of cultural rights as the protection of business practice continues to circulate in the public domain, with the Creative Commons providing a counter-legal position of open licensing. Problematically, a debate on the creative rights of citizens remains external to this legal framework, (dis)affecting a young demographic in particular. However, cultural rights are not simply legislated but enacted, as activity in spaces such as Youtube and Vimeo, evidences. Emergent patterns of media consumption and interaction with ad-hoc or experimental tools are used to create media worlds that sustain identities, communities and networks, particularly those of a young demographic existing at the periphery of democratic processes; many young people, for example, are not engaged with the voting system. If a youth-created 'bazaar' cinema is consigned to the margins of the social-symbolic field, this marginal positioning is likely to have consequences for other symbolic interactions, as research has demonstrated in the UK (Willis, 2004). This paradoxical situation in which formal statements of regulation fail to govern patterns of media consumption, and the activities of creative repurposing continue to exist in an unofficial capacity, reproduces various forms of cultural exclusion. The research network provides a series of linkages between official and unofficial parties involved with film culture, not only in the UK, but cross-culturally. To focus research exclusively on national definitions of cultural rights risks staying within the parameters of naturalized understandings. The research breaks with these limitations by establishing an international network with partner institutions in Mumbai. The megacities of India provide one of the richest illustrations of bazaar cinema, as current scholarship demonstrates (Dudrah et al, 2012). Over the duration of the project, stakeholders in cultural industries and related groups in the UK are brought into the network to debate the outcomes of this international and mulit-stakeholder dialogue.