Big Stories, Small Towns: Bongkud-Namaus, Sabah, Malaysia

Big Stories, Small Towns is a transmedia documentary project (www.bigstories.com.au). The project seeks to describe multi-layered communities and explore complex relations between people, social backgrounds, technology and place. The project is based around filmmakers living in residence in a small town and creating stories focussed on local people caring for and creating their community. Since 2008 residencies have been undertaken in 13 towns – mainly in Australia and the Asia Pacific. In 2014 and 2015 the Big Stories team led by Martin Potter and Sabahan filmmaker Nadira Ilana ran film and photography workshops in Kampung Bongkud (Bongkud Village). Bongkud and Namaus Villages are in the Raunau district in Sabah, Malaysia approximately 140 km from the state\u27s capital city of Kota Kinabalu and 20km from Mount Kinabalu. Bongkud-Namaus is an ethnic Dusun community that is predominantly Christian with a Muslim minority. The primary language spoken is a Ranau dialect of Dusun. The two villages bonded in the 1970s when villagers from Namaus moved over to Bongkud Village in need of farmlands. The villagers of Bongkud and Namaus are mostly involved with agriculture - subsistence farming, palm oil and market gardens. Some locals work for Camp Bongkud, a subsidiary of Camps International, a UK-based voluntourism company. The Big Stories team assisted locals in producing films and images with a focus on their Dusun heritage, relationships and dreams. The world premiere for Big Stories in Bongkud-Namaus took place on the 12th of March 2016 in Bongkud Village and was an all day cultural celebration of Dusun culture, which saw over 1,000 people attend. The project released a Malaysia specific domain: www.bigstories.com.my - the first Big Stories Co. town to receive its own country specific domain. Between June 2016 and November 2016 there were over 30,000 visits to the Big Stories site. Through other media coverage over 400,000 people were made aware of the project including over 100,000 views of this video produced by r.age Malaysia: http://rage.com.my/sabah-stories/ Through the Big Stories social media through festival and conference presentations (such as Freedom Film Festival, August 2016, Borneo Eco Film Festival, October 2016 and the Georgetown Literary Festival, November, 2016) resulted in additional visibility of the research. Selection of the stories in these competitive festivals is further evidence of research excellence