Shared Visions: A Cross-Generational Documentary Collaboration in Vava'u, Tonga
Date
Authors
Brown Pulu, Teena
Tonga, Sylvester
Amoamo, Rewi
Meredith, Nikolase
Supervisor
Item type
Journal Article
Degree name
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Brill | Sense
Abstract
The authors are collaborators on Sylvester Tonga’s doctoral documentary, filmed with the weavers and farmers who sustain these agricultural traditions in Leimatu’a, his village of origin in the Vava’u Islands of Tonga. An archipelago of fifty-one atolls, Vava’u lies 300 kilometres north of Tonga’s capital, Nuku’alofa. Using screengrabs and photographs made by the production crew with the Leimatu’a contributors, they consider how Sylvester’s cultural identity shaped both the community filming process and the cross-generational collaboration between himself, a Tongan migrant to New Zealand, and the New Zealand-born Tongan producers, Rewi Amoamo and Nikolase Meredith. Here, they reflect on the conceptual and methodological intricacies that have emerged from this cross-generational teamwork between a migrant Tongan who has lived his adult life in Auckland and a New Zealand-born Tongan production crew.Description
Keywords
451312 Pacific Peoples media, film, animation and photography, 451807 Pacific Peoples community-based research, 451317 Pacific Peoples research methods, 451307 Pacific Peoples ethics, 360104 Visual cultures, 3901 Curriculum and pedagogy
Source
Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy, ISSN: 2364-4583 (Print); 2364-4583 (Online), Brill | Sense, 11(1), 1-19. doi: 10.1163/23644583-bja10071
Rights statement
© Tonga et al., 2026. Published with license by Koninklijke Brill BV. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.