Moana
Robert J. Flaherty’s follow-up to Nanook of the North shifts from the Arctic to the South Seas, portraying Samoan village life with a painterly eye. Blending ethnographic detail with a romanticized “Gauguin idyll,” the film celebrates daily rituals, communal traditions, and the passage into adulthood, suffused with what Flaherty called “pride of beauty, pride of strength.”
Sky Pirates
Air force Lieutenant Harris starts for a flight to Boa Boa, on board Reverend Mitchell with a box containing a part of a top-secret extraterrestrial key. They get lost in a supernatural storm and find themselves after an emergency landing in kind of a Bermuda triangle, 5,000 miles off their course. Home again, no one believes Harris' story, and his crew suspiciously denies it too. Harris is thrown in jail, but manages to escape. Together with Mitchell's daughter he seeks the lost part of the key and its secret.
Lights and Shadows
A black-and-white short film about Heiva, a Tahitian folklore festivity.
Outrageous Fortune: The Movie
It's Christmas 2006. Wolf's in prison to stay, Judd's in prison and trying to get out. The family is going to Tutaekuri Bay, where they go to every year — only some things have changed. Who is that in "their" spot? Who put a gate up stopping access to "their" beach? Who will win the bet on when Pascalle will give it up? And why do they always come here in the first place?
Shaping Bamboo
For the 'Are'are people of the Solomon Islands, the most valued music is that of the four types of panpipe ensembles. With the exception of slit drums, all musical instruments are made of bamboo; therefore the general word for instruments and the music performed with them is "bamboo" ('au). This film shows the making of panpipes, from the cutting the bamboo in the forest to the making of the final bindings. The most important part of the work consists in shaping each tube to its necessary length. Most 'Are'are panpipe makers measure the length of old instruments before they shape new tubes. Master musician 'Irisipau, surprisingly, takes the measure using his body, and adjusts the final tuning by ear. For the first time we can see here how the instruments and their artificial equiheptatonic scale-seven equidistant degrees in an octave-are practically tuned.
Nauru, an Island Adrift
A quiet island, lost in the pacific ocean. Nothing worth of interest, until the day a stroke of luck, phosphate, provided by the island's coral core, led the country to incredible heights: in 1975, it became the second richest country per inhabitant in the world after Saudi Arabia... Only to plunge into ruins a few years later.
Sacred Vessels: Navigating Tradition and Identity in Micronesia
A 1997 documentary by Micronesian scholar, Vicente M. Diaz, that follows a new generation of traditional outrigger canoe builders and navigators from Polowat, Central Carolines, Federated States of Micronesia, and Guam in their respective efforts to continue and resuscitate an ancient tradition of outrigger canoe carving and sailing in the late twentieth century. Like the motif of water that flows through the documentary and blurs lines between surface and depth, and between water, land and air, an indefatigable tradition and aesthetic of seafaring is shown to also challenge pat and problematic distinctions between past and present, tradition and modernity, indigenous and Christian religiosity and spirituality, that prevail in conventional understandings of Micronesian culture and history.
Sons from Afar
New Zealand hip-hop artist Che Fu and his father Tigi Ness travel to their island homeland Niue for the first time to unravel the shared histories. There they also wow the locals with a performance at the Niue Arts and Cultural Festival.