Shaking Up the Happy Isles

For a child of the pacific diaspora, it seemed a perfect place to meet: amidst the clamor and conveyor belts of Auckland Airport. This year 1,100 Samoans will officially migrate to New Zealand, swelling the ranks of the estimated 115,000 of their countrymen - two out of five Samoans - who live there. Sima Urale is one of them. To identify herself at the airport meeting, "from a million islanders flying out and arriving that same day," she's sent through a passport photo of herself - though when she turns up, hair cascading over a tracksuit top and jeans, there's no mistaking her unbridled energy. In 1974, when Urale was five, her parents moved the family from their small village of Fagamalo to Wellington, in search of a better education for their six kids. "All Pacific Islanders' dream was to go to these places," she recalls, "where they thought the footpaths were paved with gold." Some migrants would find both more and less than they expected; others would arrive at a creative life, where the memory of their homeland would become grist for their art. In many ways, these souls are still in transit. The rhymes of Bill Urale, the Auckland rap star also known as King Kapisi, echo out across the Pacific: "You are immersed in a vision cultivated by this Samoan / Strong is my brethren Samoa mo Samoa…" And as a filmmaker, his sister Sima projects an image of her homeland just as fixed and fervent. "You can never lose that bond," she says.

As a child growing up on the island of Savaii, an hour's ferry ride and a world away from Apia, the capital, Sima recalls "chasing after cars, because it was such an unusual sight. And kids are still chasing after cars." These days, Urale does her chasing with the camera. In 1992, after realizing the world wasn't going to come to her as an actor, Urale enrolled at Melbourne's renowned Swinburne film school (now the Victorian College of the Arts). To help raise funds for her studies, friends and family pulled together to organize a "Cyclone Sima" appeal, and their faith in the fledgling filmmaker proved prophetic.

After graduating in 1994, Urale moved back to Wellington to shoot O Tamaiti (1996). A 15-min. short filmed in black and white and with barely a word of dialogue, it showed cinema's ability to shift perceptions, if not mountains. Innovatively shot from the perspective of an 11-year-old Samoan boy called Tino, as he struggles to bring up his five siblings on a housing estate while his parents are busy making money and more babies, O Tamaiti (The Children) took out the coveted Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, a first for a Pacific Islander director. Hinting at domestic violence, the film offered a strikingly dark view of Samoan life. "She wants to undo that happy haven idea of the Pacific," says Suhanya Raffel, head of Asian, Pacific and International Art at the Queensland Art Gallery, which will showcase Urale's work at next year's Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, "to look at much deeper social issues."

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