Creating Nonfiction Film in Our Mother Tongue: Samoan, Tongan, Punjabi

Abstract

We are three postgraduates of Te Ara Poutama Faculty at Auckland University of Technology. We have written a collective piece as a distinct group who emigrated from villages, districts, and countries outside of Aotearoa. We are nonfiction filmmakers creating film in our mother tongue; Fritz in Samoan, Sylvester in Tongan, and Asim in Punjabi. Through our shared experiences we have become trusted friends and collegial support for one another. Consciously, we chose to take up practice-led research in a faculty of Māori students and staff for cultural and strategic reasons. That very same rationale has prompted us to co-author our paper as contributors to a small but growing number of Aotearoa language films made by practitioners who although are not Indigenous to the lands we are living on, are, however, descended from the original inhabitants in our countries of origin.

To impress upon readers the importance of why we create Samoan, Tongan, and Punjabi nonfiction film for, and with, our language communities, we have used this publication to make a point of authoring our individual stories in Samoan, Tongan, and Punjabi, with an accompanying English translation. The true sense behind the ideas we are conveying with words and images is therefore contained in the Samoan, Tongan, and Punjabi texts. By contrast, the English translation is our humble interpretation that we feel falls short of communicating the complexly woven fabric of meaning found in the original language. For this reason, the English translation is secondary to the mother tongue.