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A powerful documentary by Chiara Cox created in collaboration with the Mangyan Heritage Center, this film is a deep dive into one of the few surviving ancient Filipino writing systems—the Hanunuo Mangyan script.
As one of only four pre-10th-century scripts still in use, it remains an essential part of Mangyan culture through the ambahan—beautiful, sung poetry that shares wisdom across generations.
Chiara’s documentary brings this unique tradition to life through interviews and stories, revealing its enduring impact on Filipino heritage and the global diaspora.
The showing will be followed by a Q&A and discussion moderated by Tim Brookes of the Endangered Alphabets Project.
Chiara Cox
Presented in conjunction with the School for Oriental and African Studies in London, the Philippine Embassy and our sibling organization, the National Museum of Language.
Philippa Steele of our sibling organization, the VIEWS Project of Cambridge University, explores the graphic anthropology involved in creating a new script for a language community, one that not only accurately represents the sounds of its language but visually represents its cultural history, traditions and iconography.
Her guests will include Juan Casco, creator of the Mayan-influenced Silabario Amazonico for the Amazonian languages of northern South America; Pule kaJanolintshi, who has been deeply involved in the creation, dissemination and teaching of the Ditema tsa Dinoko syllabary of southern Africa, and Gerry Leonidas, whose graduate program at the University of Reading embraces the creation of new fonts for non-Latin scripts by extensive immersion in their cultures.
Philippa Steele
Juan Casco, Pule kaJanolintshi, and Gerry Leonidas
The Sign and Symbol Research Group, based at Warsaw University, includes many of the world’s leading scholars in grapholinguistics—the fascinating intersection of what is generally considered writing with what is generally considered art.
Daniel Takacs, Aleksandra Twardokęs, Agnieszka Hamann, Aleksandra Wąsowicz-Peinado, and Olgierd Uziembło.
Live calligraphy performance by Barbara Galińska to music by Kamila Owsianko.
Trained in Italy and England as a calligrapher, Alice Mazzilli jumped the fence and has become one of Europe’s most interesting graffiti artists, bending and breaking traditional conventions of both forms to interrogate writing itself. She discusses her work with Tim Brookes, host of the remaining events of the day.
Alice Mazzilli
The Wikimedia Foundation has quietly been opening doors and creating online opportunities for minority communities to introduce and represent themselves in their own languages and even scripts. Satdeep Gill, who is deeply involved in this work, explains their progress and looks into works in progress.
Satdeep Gill
Few corporate initiatives have done as much to address the challenges of minority scripts as Google Fonts. Dave Crossland, who leads the Google Fonts team, discusses the unique challenges involved in digitizing scripts that may never been printed and considers next steps in addressing what has been called the “digital divide” between “digitally advantaged” and “digitally disadvantaged” communities.
Dave Crossland
Anushah Hossain recently took over the helm at the Script Encoding Initiative, in many senses the doorway for organizations and companies working to bring digitization to the written world, from her predecessor and mentor Deborah Anderson. Where does SEI stand now, and what new directions is it considering?
Anushah Hossain
Two thousand years ago, the Amazigh people inhabited North Africa from the Canary Islands to the western borders of Egypt.
Since then, they have been invaded and marginalized by the Romans, the Arabs and the French, in many cases living as nomads in the harsh conditions of the desert.
In the last 50 years, though, a series of difficult and often bloody developments have led to a growing acceptance of and respect for the Amazigh and their ancient script, Tifinagh.
Jamal Benhamou
