I got the incredible opportunity to speak with six of the nine directors from VAI, a portmanteau film that was shot on seven different Pacific Islands. It's the story of female empowerment as each of these nine directors tell the story of one woman named Vai through their own individually unique lens. 'Vai' means water and encapsulates various women from the Pacific Islands. First I spoke to Miria George, from the Cook Islands.
Emily Clark
Tell me about your vision and what inspired this collaboration?
Miria George
Kuki Airani(Cook Islands)
A call was put out by our producers, Brown Sugar Apple Grunt Productions. With VAI, we are part of a trilogy. We are the second film in the trilogy, WATER is the first. About seventy different female Pacific filmmakers who put forward an idea that could be utilized as part of this project. We happened to make the cut, being the final nine. With my own project...I was very keen to contribute to a conversation that's already happening on my island that's around the sovereignty and protection of our waters. The call that the producers put out was asking for stories of women and their connection to the water. We wanted to tell a story about female empowerment.
Emily Clark
Time seems to be measured by the ocean and by nature. It has this really magical quality to it. The stories don't seem to begin or end, they're kind of intertwined. I'd like to hear more from the other filmmakers how you came up with your character.
Ofa Guttenbeil
(Tonga)
I write the second story from Tonga. My story was inspired by the recent cyclone that hit Tonga--Cyclone Gita. I saw quite vividly after the cyclone hit, the scarcity of water, but also that in every day life in Tonga, there's always a tendency for the families who don't own water tanks...to get water. And so the children are often tasked to ask the houses who do have water tanks to ask for water. I also wrote that piece because I'm a mother of young children around those ages [the ages of the children in the film] and I know what their banter is. It came organically to me.
Emily Clark
Vai is this girl who has been interpreted in many different ways through your own lens and perspective and what it means for the islands you're representing and I wanted to know what your vision was.
Dianna Fuemana
(Niue)
I had the story where Vai is now a grandmother. I wanted to explore with the grandmother, [how] Vai, by the beginning is not wanting to leave home, and by the time she becomes a grandmother, she finds herself in the same position her own grandmother was in. I wanted to [speak] to the maturity of our women as we become older and the sacrifices we have to make as well as the guidance we have to pass on to the young women coming up beneath us. With this Vai, I wanted to give her some different types of complexity, so... I keyed into the themes of love and connection and I wanted to include the non-binary and gender fluid identity.
Emily Clark
Tell me a little bit more about the filmmaking process and what the experience was like?
Matasila Freshwater
(Solomon Islands)
We were all brought together for a five day writers' retreat. We had come to the film with a sense of the story that we wanted to tell. For me it was really about a sense of displacement that a lot of Pacifica and Oceana people feel and to live their cultural identity... what it means to live between spaces. I lived in New Zealand and was born in New Zealand but my mom is from the Solomon Islands. That is a different sense of identity for me. That was what really drove my piece. We had creative parameters like the theme of water and the ten minute vignette and this moment in time where we focus on a woman making a decision. Those are great for inspiration. I like parameters for that reason. It makes you feel more creative because you have rules to play with. It turned into these two women having a conversation in canoes on the water. I stuck them in place which was challenging, but really fun and really rewarding.
Emily Clark: I was interested in the relationship between New Zealand and [Samoa] with the professor not understanding where she [the student] comes from. What do you hope to communicate and what do you hope the [viewer] takes away?
Amberley Jo Aumua
(Samoa)
(Aotearoa) New Zealand
My vignette was inspired by my experience being at university as well as [that of] my Pacific sisters who studied with me. It's not an uncommon story at all. It's very common in New Zealand we just haven't been given a platform to show that. I wanted to speak out about it because a lot of us who do go into university while we're fresh out of high school are very young. Some of us can be very naïve to the Western colonized system. What I want audiences to take away as well as what I took away from uni and from this film is to have the courage to speak up and to lean on your brothers and sisters around you as well. Speaking up is my motto now.
Emily Clark
Where there any stories that inspired you [for this vignette]?
Did you draw from mythology when telling your story?
Marina Alofagia McCartney
(Samoa)
My story involves a ritual through dance and historically on screen, and I think you can harp to the way the hula has been represented. Our dancers have been eroticized, fictionalized and packaged for the West. I wanted to present a different perspective of our dance... [with] the daughter of a chief... it was [she] who would lead our warriors into battle wielding the nifo oti, the sword that you see because she was seen to attract the favor of the gods. The woman who was dancing... isn't just someone to be sexualized, [or] eroticized. She's filled with a lot of sacred power. I'm drawn to that, I'm interested in that as a Samoan woman and the fact that she was leading the dance. She wasn't relegated to the background. That's what I wanted to allude to. She's a different type of Oceanic woman. We are multi-dimensional, multi-layered.
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