The Orator/O Le Tulafale (review)

The Orator/O Le Tulafale has been touted as the first full-length feature film to be written and directed by a Samoan and filmed in Sāmoa and in the Samoan language. Given that the screenwriter and director, Tusi Tamasese, is a University of Waikato film school graduate and earned a master's in screenwriting from the Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), and that the film was largely funded by the New Zealand Film Commission, produced by a New Zealander, and features some of New Zealand's most respected visual and sound technicians, The Orator is also being enthusiastically claimed as a New Zealand film. For a directorial debut, it is remarkable that the film has received critical acclaim at the Venice Film Festival in 2011, is scheduled for the 2012 Sundance Festival, and was nominated by New Zealand for an Academy Award in the category of foreign language films.

The central characters of The Orator are a farmer and a weaver. Sa'ili and his wife Va'aiga each have painful histories of being excluded or diminished by others—Sa'ili for being not only an untitled adult male in a village and society that privileges chiefs, but a little person to boot, and Va'aiga for shaming her family by having a child out of wedlock. Sa'ili has raised Va'aiga's teenage daughter Litia as his own, although Litia is ambivalent about having him as a father. The film centers on Sa'ili and Va'aiga's struggles to confront their own fears and demons—Sa'ili through acquiring a talking chief title, and Va'aiga by weaving a fine mat ('ie tōga) of atonement. Their quests are set amid scenes of majestic mountain ridges, lush taro plantations, tranquil bathing pools, and meticulously manicured rural villages. Ironically, given that the film title might lead one to expect an abundance of verbiage (a tulāfale is a talking chief), one of the distinguishing features of the film is its economy of dialogue. The silence simultaneously tills and weaves the possibilities for multiple layers of understanding through the film. Like Sa'ili the farmer and Va'aiga the weaver, The Orator is able to present gifts to those who would receive them. Through this review, we attempt, as non-Samoan Pacific Islanders—Micronesians—to reciprocate.

We both saw the film, for the first time, in the early days of its screening in Wellington, New Zealand, in October 2011. Our review features our individual "takes" on the film, with Emelihter responding to The Orator's representations of place and culture, and Teresia approaching the film as a teacher in Pacific studies. As creative writers and active participants in arts communities across the region, both of us have a keen sense of a shared genealogy when it comes to an "Oceanic imaginary" (Subramani, "The Oceanic Imaginary," 2001). We close our review with reflections on what it means now to have The Orator situated in that genealogy.

Reaction shot (Emelihter): "I wanted Sāmoa to be a character in the film," said Tusi Tamasese during a cast and crew Q&A held at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) in Wellington on 29 October 2011. This character is the one we see first: Sāmoa—fecund, quiet, dark, and thirsty. Audiences are made to listen to the whisper that comes just before the downpour, and it was then that I knew this was going to be an honest Pacific (Samoan) film. Already, I wanted to cry, and very few movies make me cry. Because I'm from Pohnpei in Micronesia, an island with rainfall of more than 300 inches a year, rain is a central part of my Pohnpeian/ Pacific understanding. Rain on a tin roof represents home to those of us...