Te Marama Rio
Tama
"With his island at risk from industrial tourism and environmental degradation, a boy travels back in time to reconnect with his ancestors."
An airplane lands. A massive cruise boat anchors off the reef, disgorging tourists for tropical island vacations. This postcard paradise depends on petroleum imports to fuel its cars, motorbikes, boats, hotels, pumps and machinery. Yet if the tourists stopped coming, what then? The film opens with the prophetic words of Niuean artist John Pule and continues as a visual tone poem, without dialogue or narration, moving forward into the past to ask questions about the future. A young man travels back in time, from luxury resorts and lagoon tours through pandemic and population exodus, to early Christianity when missionaries incinerated his island’s atua and marae. Finally he reconnects with his tīpuna who settled the island a thousand years ago.
Director
Mindwalk
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Tempest
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A Summer to Remember
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The Young One
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All Day and a Night
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The Convert
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Tabu: A Story of the South Seas
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Eleanor the Great
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The Nest
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The Road Dance
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Return to the Blue Lagoon
1991
Cast Away
2000
Tigertail
2020
Nothing Personal
2009