indigenous people

Vai – A Tribute to the Indigenous Women of the Pacific Islands

Vai Film Difficulty Ranking: 2

Why Watch Vai?

For a collection of 8 short films set across the Pacific Islands
See a shared indigenous Pacific Islander experience
It’s a powerful feminist tribute, featuring 8 women, and directed by 9

From: Cook Islands, Fiji, New Zealand, Niue, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Australasia
Watch: Trailer, Amazon Prime, Tubi, JustWatch
Next: Whale Rider, Boyhood, The Orator

a collection of short films

Vai is a collection of eight short films made by 9 women which takes place across seven different countries (Fiji, Tonga, Solomon Islands, New Zealand, Kuki Airani, Samoa, and Niue). The titular character, Vai, is played by eight different indigenous women aging from 6 to 80.

Another interesting thing to note before watching is that ‘Vai’ translates as ‘water’ in each of the countries named above. Water is an integral part of the story. It surrounds each of the islands, which isolates each community, making traveling between islands harder. It’s ability to provide food is threatened as companies infringe on and overfish in traditional fishing waters. Drinking water is also rare and hoarded by the privileged. Most importantly, it gives life, both spiritually (as in the final short) and physically.

“We sweat and cry salt water, so we know that the ocean is really in our blood”
Teresia Teaiwa

A Common Indigenous Experience

Vai’s journey is played by 8 different indigenous actresses across 7 different countries and 8 different ages. In the first short, Vai is a 6 year old girl in Fiji, and the film progresses until the final short shows her as an 80 year old woman in Aeotara (New Zealand). By shooting Vai’s journey with different actresses across different countries, Vai creates a common indigenous Pacific Islander experience.

One common theme is the cycle of leaving and returning. In the first three shorts, Vai lives without her mother or father, as they’ve been forced to travel to New Zealand to try and provide for their family. In the fourth, Vai has already left Samoa and is studying in New Zealand. The final four films feature an older Vai that has returned to home. She returns and has to relearn the traditional ways she has forgotten. Whilst she regains her community, her younger relatives leave their homes just as she did, repeating the cycle of coming and going.

(Insert analogy comparing the coming and going of the people and tradition to the coming and going of the sea tides).

A Life Well Lived

The Pacific Islander experience may be new to some viewers, however, the experience of life is much more universal. It’s scope reminded me a little bit of Linklater’s Boyhood, except here the scope is much larger. Instead of focusing on a child from 8 years old to 18, Vai follows a woman across a whole lifetime. In doing so it encapsulates the entire experience of life in 90 minutes. When you’re watching Vai as an 80 year old, the memories of the shorts of Vai as a 6 and 13 year old are still clear in your head which allows us to enter Vai’s old age with a greater understanding of where she came from. These are memories that we often lose touch of once we hit adulthood in our own lives. Showing it all in one film lets us see life repeating itself and allows us to better empathize with Vai as an older woman.

What to Watch Next

If you’re after more indigenous stories from the Pacific Islands, check out Whale Rider, The Orator, Waru, or even Tanna. For too crossover films you could also check out Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Rabbit Proof Fence.

Or, if you’re looking for more films which follow a single character across different ages, I’d strongly recommend checking out Boyhood and Moonlight. They’re two great U.S. films about growing up.

The Dead and the Others – Running From Your Destiny

The Dead and the Others Film Difficulty Ranking: 4

The Dead and the Others follows Ihjãc, a 15 year old indigenous Krahô father. After his own father dies, he starts to hear voices and receives a visit from the legendary macaw, a signal of the start of his transformation into a shaman. However, instead of accepting his duty, he runs away to a white Brazilian cowboy town a day’s drive away from his community. It’s here, isolated from his people that he faces the reality of being an indigenous person in contemporary Brazil.

In a way, The Dead and the Others feels like a prequel to Maya Da-Rin’s The Fever. Both films are directed by outsiders filming indigenous people in Brazil, but whereas The Dead and the Others centers on a young person leaving his community, The Fever centers on a middle aged man that has already left his community that starts being drawn back to it through visions and the prejudices he faces in ‘white’ Brazil. Both I believe are two great films to watch to get a glimpse into the indigenous experience in Brazil. However, take this opinion with a pinch of salt as I haven’t had the opportunity yet to watch any indigenous films from Brazil actually told by indigenous people. Please let me know if you have any recommendations!

From: Brazil, South America
Watch: Short Clip, JustWatch, Mubi
Next: Land of Ashes, Zama, A Fever

A Storm Was Coming (Anunciaron Tormenta) – Berlinale 2020

A Storm Was Coming starts with a still shot of the landscape of Equatorial Guinea. Slowly, the landscape becomes more and more overexposed until the shot is completely whitewashed and the landscape has disappeared. This visual example of whitewashing to start A Storm Was Coming is a style that director Jose Fernandez Vasquez uses throughout the film to represent the Spanish Empire’s eradication of the culture of Equatorial Guinea.

The Spanish Empire controlled Equatorial Guinea until 1968. As presented by the Spanish texts from the Francoist era which are read in the film, their rule was benevolent. Colonialism and the power structures it left ensured that an indigenous voice didn’t arise to challenge the Spanish hegemony. This one sided history is represented throughout the film through the scenes of a white man recording Spanish history and the lack of indigenous representation.

Scenes of a white Spanish man in a recording studio reading passages from bibliographies of Spanish colonists make up the bulk of A Storm Was Coming. The passages, which are being recorded in a studio in Madrid, present a one sided view of the history of Equatorial Guinea from the capital of the colonizers. These scenes are visually supported by images of different Spanish missions in Equatorial Guinea appearing out of a blank screen, as if they’re appearing on white photographic paper processed in the photographic darkroom. Their appearance from nothing, perpetuates the controversial colonial viewpoint that colonialism ‘civilized’ their colonies, providing infrastructure, culture, and history. It’s a viewpoint that erases all pre-colonial history, as if nothing of significance existed before the colonists’ arrival. The director combines images of Spanish missions appearing from ‘nothing’ with the reading of Spanish colonial texts to demonstrate the Spanish hegemony of written, aural, and visual Equatoguinean history.

Whilst the voices of Spanish colonists are being preserved, the voices of the colonized have been lost. We hear from a few Bubi people (one of the indigenous groups in Equatorial Guinea), but we never see them on screen. They tell us about Esaasi Eweera, a Bubi leader who tried to resist the Spanish Empire. He’s a heroic leader in their eyes, but his resistance is diminished in Spanish texts. As a result, he has almost disappeared from history, just as the place of his birth has disappeared under overgrown bush. Furthermore, whilst the film spends a lot of time documenting the Spanish voices in Madrid and showing images of Spanish missions, the only pictures of native Equatoguinean people are flashed onto the screen for less than half of a second. Their lack of representation emphasizes how the Spanish rule has lasted visually and aurally, seared onto the minds of the native and Spanish people. In contrast, the Bubi have disappeared from the past and present; they don’t even appear in the film.

Well, at least until the very last scene. To prevent enforcing the Spanish narrative the film reveals, the director, a Spanish filmmaker himself, ends A Storm Was Coming with a face on interview with Bubi scholar Justo Bolekia Boleká. It’s the first time the director shows a native Equatoguinean on screen, giving him more respect than the other characters with a face to face interview. It’s also the first time we hear the Bube language. Ending with Justo Bolekia Boleká and his daughter reciting a Bubi poem in Bube, reveals one thing the Spanish couldn’t eradicate: memory. It’s an ending statement that shows that Bubi culture still survives, despite the Spanish cultural and historical hegemony which still holds power today.

Watched on Festival Scope Pro. This film screened at the Berlinale Forum 2020.

N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman Before and After Independence

N!ai Film Difficulty Ranking: 2

Indigenous Batswana films aren’t easy to find, so if you know of any, please contact me here. In the meantime, check out N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman (the exclamation marks represent click sounds). It’s a documentary made by an American anthropologist, so it’s by no means a true Batswana film. However, you will get to see the impact of the white government on the independence of the !Kung people as portrayed through the life of a !Kung woman named N!ai.

From: Botswana, Africa
Watch: Trailer, Kanopy, Rent on Vimeo
Next: Another Country, Black Girl, Smoke Signals