Shared Visions: A Cross-Generational Documentary Collaboration in Vava'u, Tonga

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.