By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 14

A film drawn from a real protest and a published book raises a quiet question of who owns the telling.

Wrong Generation is usually read as an activism story. Underneath it sits a question of ownership. The film, called a landmark for independent Namibian filmmaking, is adapted from Ndiilokelwa Nthengwe’s 2022 book on the #ShutItAllDown protests – which means the screen version rests on rights, adaptation and authorship long before it reaches a box office.

For an independent producer, intellectual property is not a legal footnote; it is the asset itself. The book, the screenplay, the finished film and even the name are separate rights, and each has to be held, licensed or assigned for the project to exist and to earn.

From page to screen is a licence

The film’s foundation is a published work. Nthengwe wrote the 2022 book that reflected on the October 2020 protests, and Wrong Generation adapts it, with the author herself attached as executive producer. When the person who owns the source material also helps produce the film, the adaptation rights stay close to home rather than being sold to a distant studio.

That alignment is an advantage independent projects rarely enjoy. The owner of the underlying book sits inside the production, so the chain of rights from page to screen is short and directly controlled, not negotiated across competing outside interests.

When the author produces the film, the adaptation rights never leave the room.

Layers of copyright in one film

A single film carries several copyrights at once. The book is one work, the screenplay another, and the completed film a third, each protected separately under the framework administered by Namibia’s Business and Intellectual Property Authority. Knowing which right sits where is what lets a producer license a soundtrack, sell a broadcast window or defend the work against copying.

For a young industry, that layering is easy to overlook and costly to ignore. A film that has not settled who owns which layer cannot cleanly sell any of them, and rights left unsold are simply value left on the table.

A film is a stack of copyrights, and each one is a separate thing to sell or lose.

The story the public also lived

Wrong Generation draws on events that thousands of people took part in. #ShutItAllDown was a public movement, and no one owns a protest, yet a specific dramatisation of it – these characters, this script, this telling – is protected authorship. The line between shared history and owned expression is exactly where the film’s intellectual property lives.

That distinction matters for anyone adapting real events. The facts of October 2020 belong to everyone; a particular way of staging them belongs to the makers, and it is that expression, not the history, that copyright protects and that gives the film its defensible worth.

History is common property; a telling of it is not.

The name is an asset too

Wrong Generation is now a title attached to a book, a film and a recognisable public identity. A distinctive name used in trade can be registered and protected as a mark through the same intellectual property authority, separately from the copyright in the work. For a project that may extend into further books, screenings or merchandise, the name is a brand worth holding.

This is the commercial edge of intellectual property. Copyright protects the work; a trademark protects the name under which it trades, and a producer who secures both controls far more of whatever the project later becomes.

Copyright guards the film; a trademark guards the franchise it might grow into.

For a producer, an author or an investor in Namibian creative work, Wrong Generation shows why intellectual property is the real balance sheet of an independent film: the book, the script, the film and the name are distinct assets, and value leaks wherever one is left unsecured. The decision it puts forward is whether to treat rights as paperwork to finish later, or as the very thing being built and sold.

Sources: The Namibian; Business and Intellectual Property Authority (BIPA); Excerpt: You F…ed With the Wrong Generation (Brittle Paper)