The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival is likely America’s main entry point for Pacific Islander, Asian and Asian American productions. The 41st annual LAAPFF is taking place May 1-7 in various L.A. venues and presented by Visual Communications, an L.A.-based media organization whose “mission is to develop and support the voices of Asian American & Pacific Islander filmmakers and media artists who empower communities and challenge perspectives. Founded in 1970 with the understanding that media and the arts are powerful forms of storytelling, Visual Communications creates cross cultural connections between peoples and generations.”
As a film historian/critic who has co-authored three movie history books with Luis Reyes chronicling the screen image of Hawaiians and other Islanders from Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia, at LAAPFF I focus on the “P.” It’s exciting to see how South Seas Cinema is growing, as more and more Indigenous filmmakers contribute to this film genre that since 1898 has been dominated by “Haole-wood” – white filmmakers cranking out movies full of South Seas celluloid stereotypes, catering to the white dominant majority culture. As LAAPFF proves, more and more Islander filmmakers are creating works by, about and for Natives.
Mythical Realism: TE Puna Ora (The Source of Life)
Te Puna Ora, Virginie Tetoofa’s 75-minute film detailing a land and cultural struggle at Moorea in French-occupied Polynesia, long considered to be among the most surpassingly beautiful islands in the world. Moorea is the diminutive isle about 12 miles from Tahiti with a jagged skyline of shark tooth shaped emerald mountains perpetually draped by melting marshmallow clouds. To be sure, Te Puna Ora has many scenic shots of Cook’s Bay, valleys, the sky, underwater, et al, but Tetoofa’s camera takes us beyond the beauty to reveal the trouble roiling beneath the surface in a spot long lauded as an earthly paradise.
As the tourism industry expands and more outsiders (presumably mostly French) seek to settle there in the Paris-ruled overseas territory, Mooreans’ traditional ways of life are being encroached upon. Construction of new over-the-water bungalows for tourists threaten not only the sea life, but also to turn public beaches freely enjoyed by their ancestors into private property with restricted access for locals. Te Puna Ora poetically expresses the Indigenous cosmological unity of Polynesians with the land, sea and sky, and how increasing intrusions by those from beyond the reef undermine that delicate balance.
Tetoofa creatively does this by intercutting the documentary footage she shot over a number of years of Mooreans organizing resistance and staging protests to bring attention to their concerns, with recreations of ancient Polynesian myths about the ancestral deities Hina and Ru, who are depicted in a voyaging canoe. This enactment of legends bestows a sense of the sacred cosmology tying Islanders to their Islands, and how unsustainable development (including the possibility of deep-sea mining), disrupts this sense of oneness.
As in the myth portrayed, the contemporary Mooreans weave strands of leaves into a long braid to unit demonstrators at a beachside manifestation – suggesting the umbilical cord that connects them to Mother Nature. Tetoofa also tells her story by following three female activists of different generations: Anuavai, who represents the young generation, looks as if she just stepped out of a Gauguin painting. Poema is a 30-something mother who becomes embroiled in a dispute caught on camera by that fly on the wall, Tetoofa, when a white French-speaking settler orders Poema to anchor her boat elsewhere – you know, at the isle of her ancestors. Hinano Murphy symbolizes the elder generation, as this eloquent organizer takes her crusade to preserve nature and the Polynesian way literally from Moorea to Manhattan, where she speaks at the 2019 World Oceans Day at the United Nations.
By combining documentary realism with mythology, Moorea-born Tetoofa poetically, elegantly elevates her subject matter via an Indigenous aesthetic and form of storytelling that could be called “Mythical Realism.” Her film also transcends the “Haole-wood” stereotype of the Polynesian vahine as being merely nubile pneumatic naked nymphs, the love interests of Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, and Mel Gibson in various Tinsletown versions of the Bounty mutiny saga. While Tetoofa’s trio of women may be beautiful too, they are also intelligent, powerful, dedicated change agents fighting to preserve their way of life and Island. And of course, it is an Indigenous auteur, a Tahitian female director who brings this new dimension to the screen image of Polynesian vahines. Her film is executive produced by Hawaiian helmer, Ciara Leina`ala Lacy, another Polynesian woman.
Cinematic self-determination means that the self – not the other – represents him/herself on the screen, rendering enhanced imagery of authenticity and sensitivity. Te Puna Ora admirably succeeds in this, and in doing so, it fulfills Visual Communications’ mission statement and is a milestone in the rising Indigenous Tidal Wave of the unfolding genre of South Seas Cinema.
For info re: LAAPFF see: https://festival.vcmedia.org/2025/ and see: https://www.ahicompany.fr/.
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