By Ben Wheeler
The Fourth Pacific Human Rights Film Festival is gearing up for what organisers expect to be its biggest and most successful year yet.
This October audiences will be treated to the Fijian premiere of the sumptuous ecofeminist feature Pacific Mother and an exclusive director’s cut of the stunning reef renewal documentary Protecting Paradise. The selection also includes an assortment of short films – some from new Fijian Pacific filmmakers – combined with activities, workshops, performances and talanoa sessions designed to bring today’s most pressing human rights issues into sharp focus.
Pacific Mother and Protecting Paradise will receive the VX big-screen treatment at Damodar City Cinemas – a first for the growing festival – and will be open to all and free to attend so that you can double down on pop, popcorn and pick and mix.
The rest of the programme plays out at the festival’s usual home, the ICT Japan Pacific Multipurpose Theatre at USP’s Laucala Campus with regional screenings planned in venues in the Cook Islands, Kiribati, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, New Caledonia, Samoa, the Solomon Islands and Tonga.
The festival, which runs from September 30th to October 27th (October 5th – 19th in Fiji), will connect with schools and university campuses across the Pacific screening films that explore issues around diverse genders expression and sexual orientations awareness, nuclear legacy, reclaiming traditional knowledge and practices, climate threat, cultural memory and language loss, and flashpoint issues related smart phone use and to drug addiction.
The function and importance of festivals like this cannot be understated. Films offer unique insights and access to the world and lived experiences of marginalised and silenced groups, their emotional impact creating spaces where dialogue around tabu subjects becomes possible. Within these sessions we invite those with vital knowledge and experience on each subject to inform and educate audiences, starting discussions around subjects that can be shrouded in and distorted by misinformation and disinformation.
But that’s not all.
Fiji is joining a wave of interest in filmmaking that has run through Oceania for decades thanks to the tireless work of trailblazers like Aotearoa New Zealand’s Barry Barclay and Merata Mita. Hepi Mita opened the second Pacific Human Rights Film Festival with kind words and congratulations in his introduction to the Fijian premiere of his phenomenal documentary Merata: How Mom Decolonised the Screen in 2022.
Local filmmakers like Meli Tuqota Jr (Elections in Paradise), Litila Mitchell (Armea) and Fenton Lutunatabua (Vakaraitaka) have seen their films screen at festivals and exhibitions in London, Berlin, New York, New Zealand and beyond in recent months. Vilisoni Hereniko’s Sina Ma Tinirau – which screened at the Pacific Human Rights Film Festival last year – won Best Animated and Outstanding Animation awards in Berlin and Los Angeles respectively last year.
Last year’s Pacific Human Rights Film Festival also saw Aotearoa New Zealand born Fijian filmmaker Nina Nawalowalo introduce the premiere of her multilayered, multifaceted film A Boy Called Piano to a packed auditorium after it toured the world, winning the Best Documentary Feature award at the prestigious Montreal Independent Film Festival in Canada.
This was not always the case. The festival’s Fijian content has grown exponentially since it opened its doors in 2021 during the uncertainty that followed the COVID pandemic. Even then it brought exclusives and premieres to Fijian audiences, with Christopher Kahunahana’s outstanding Waikiki (Hawai’i) and little known documentaries like Adam Horowitz’s Nuclear Savage (Nuclear Savage) sitting alongside better known but still unseen content like Vai (which opens in Fiji before exploring the wider Pacific) and Leitis in Waiting (Tonga).
Post-screening discussions helped open audience’s eyes and minds to the possibilities of indigenous Pacific cinema as a tool to explore and steward regional narratives around over-tourism and ecofeminism, to represent post-colonial perspectives and intergenerational trauma, to reveal the still largely secret history of atomic weapons testing across Oceania, and to support gender diverse identity in the Pacific – the māhū (Hawai’i and Tahiti), vakasalewalewa (Fiji), palopa (Papua New Guinea), fa’afafine (Samoa), akava’ine (Rarotonga), fakaleiti (Tonga), and fakafifine (Niue) that comprise MVPFAFF+ –.
Every year the festival has expanded, bringing more awareness, triggering more empathy, and in some cases connecting donors with worthwhile causes.
Events like this broaden understandings of the Pacific both regionally and on the global stage, highlighting the complexity, diversity, strength and resilience of Epeli Hau’ofa’s “sea of islands” – exploding stereotypes and colonial myths, and rediscovering and celebrating knowledge and practices seen by some as close to being lost.
But then I would say all this, wouldn’t I?
Full transparency: I’ve been the festival director for the last four years.
What that means, however, is that I have taken in every screening, watched every audience marvel at the things these films illuminate, and seen memories sparked by historical footage that flow around screening venues when the movies stop rolling and the conversations start.
I’ve seen audiences in their hundreds – and cumulatively now, thousands – collectively hold their breath as the American Samoan soccer team look like they might just score their first ever competitive goal (the Next Goal Wins documentary – screened long before Taika Waititi’s wonderful reimagining!), or as a baby is born in a war-torn hospital in Aleppo barely clinging to life (the heart-wrenching, raw, powerful documentary For Sama – a festival favourite) only to be resuscitated by doctors.
The Pacific Human Rights Film Festival is about all these moments – the strong emotions that they provoke – and much more.
It is about pulling communities together to talk about their lives, loves, struggles, hopes, anxieties and fears in spaces safe and free from judgement.
It faces some uncomfortable truths about the world in which we live, but defiantly finds light in the darkness.
It feeds hearts, minds, souls and – with the occasional free buffet – stomachs, is open to all and free to all.
And it starts right here in Suva at Damodar City Cinemas with Pacific Mother, and I hope to see you there!
PHRFF2024 is brought to you by The Pacific Community and the University of the South Pacific School of Law and Social Science and School of Pacific Arts, Culture and Education, along with lead partners the New Zealand High Commission, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and sponsors the French Embassy, DFAT Australia, MFAT New Zealand, Save The Children and the Swedish International Development Agency.
PHRFF2024 has been supported and facilitated by the Ministry of Education, Fiji National University and the University of Fiji.