The film I want to talk about is "Made In Taiwan: Nathan and Oscar's Excellent Adventure" since that's what I'm most interested in, but I'll get the others out of the way first. They're all great and everyone is raving: "Eagle vs Shark", "Perfect Strangers", "Black Sheep", "Made in Taiwan" and "No.2".
"Eagle vs Shark" stars one of the guys from The Flight of the Conchords - Jemaine Clement - and it's from the Oscar nominated director Taika Waititi. Do you know The Flight of the Conchords? A Kiwi folk-music duo currently with an American TV series on HBO? It's showing on HK TV at the moment and it rocks! Jemaine and Bret are absolutely the funniest guys around, bar no one! If you want a taste, go into youtube and google "Flight of the Conchords + Business Time." (Tried to embed this for you in here, but it wouldn't let me.)
And "Eagle vs Shark" is a very awkward love story - about very awkward people looking for love - and you don't get more Jemaine and Bret than that.
"Perfect Strangers", on the other hand, is a very elegant love story ... about kidnapping. Yeah, dark humour. Stars Sam Neill and is directed by Gaylene Preston who's made a lot of films that have become Kiwi Classics. I didn't go - refused totally because I detest any suggestion that "Stockholm Syndrome" is somehow romantic - but the people who did see it loved it!
"Black Sheep", I must warn you, is very Early-Peter Jackson, which means it's the latest offering from the Kiwi Splatter genre; all about killer-sheep ripping open people's throats. Great special effects. Although the film is directed by a guy called Jonathan King, it comes from Peter Jackson's Weta Workshop which means Jackson's got over his "Lord of the Rings" Oscar and has gone back to his roots. And I just LOVE that he'd do this.
You do know Early-Peter-Jackson stuff, don't you? The Kiwi Splatter Genre? Really good humoured and very funny galloping-death-and-mayhem and lots of spectacular blood and guts splattered all over the place and people dying in every spectacular way possible. Fun!!! There are all sorts of gory clips on youtube from early Peter Jackson films if you're interested.
"No. 2" is a big-hearted family film about Fijians living in Auckland. Nanna Maria thinks her family is losing its "Fijian-ness" so demands her grandchildren throw her a feast "like she used to have in Fiji as a child", and, over the course of the day, her family regains its soul. Really heart-warming stuff! However, I was a little uncomfortable that it ended up as a pig-on-a-spit affair instead of a lovo - earth oven - and that her Fijian children and grandchildren were played by Tongans, Samoans and Maoris ... although I'm convinced granddaughter Hibiscus was from Fiji (I thought she looked like one of the Bull family - although her surname is McDermot - and would love someone to let me know if this is so?) And the pig-gifting friend was definitely Fijian (from around Sigatoka but with a Whippy somewhere in the family tree?) ...
... but I never once spotted that Nanna Maria wasn't played by a Fijian. Can you believe it? It was the Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning black American actress Ruby Dee, and I occasionally noticed something a little off, but I thought it was because this FIJIAN actress was from Taveuni - I'd love to know who rehearsed her! - only she was playing someone from Levuka! From Fiji, 100% yes, but a slight geographical voice anomaly. That's how close she got to being perfect. Oh yeah, I also half-noticed that when she spoke Fijian she said "ga" instead of "nga", which is a mistake no Fijian would make, but it was such a small thing I over-looked it and so I was totally taken in.
Total congratulations, Ruby Dee. You certainly fooled me!
Now for what I really want to talk about: "Made in Taiwan: Nathan and Oscar's Excellent Adventure" It's a very funny and charming documentary about the search for the origins of the Polynesian People ... wherein Nathan, a Maori, and Oscar, a Samoan, with help from Oxford Ancestors - the DNA testing laboratory at Oxford - I soooo want to do this - go on a physical journey tracking their DNA evidence and end up tracing their roots back to Taiwan ... which isn't correct, but a damn good start.
Oh yeah, before I tell you why they're not correct, here's something amazing. Two things, actually:
1) Turned out Nathan's dad was indeed Maori (descended from the Ancestral Father they've named Maui) but his English mother's maternal line turned out to be Native American. Wasn't his red-haired and freckled So-English mother - from Cornwall - shocked to her core! But, as Oscar told her, "Maybe one of your ancestors was a Cornish sailor who met Pocahontas and took her back to England!", however, even after that, she still looked terribly worried. I guess her entire sense of self had come crashing to the ground, and you can just see that here's one lady who's about to go on "An Excellent Adventure" of her own.
2) Samoan Oscar, holding the results in their envelope, guessed that his Ancestral Father would be Maui and his Ancestral Mother would be Ino, the name they've given to the Ancestral Mother of all Polynesians, but then he opened the envelope and discovered, indeed yes, his Maternal line was Ino ... but his Paternal line was ... Tibetan! Oscar was shocked, sure, but not me! I'm sitting there thinking "YES!!!" and wanting to air-punch bigtime. See, Samoans have very distinctive cheekbones, unlike anywhere else in the Pacific, and the only other time I've seen cheekbones like that was in Cambodia and Thailand, among the Khmer people. And DNA evidence says the Khmer are of Tibetan descent! So, yes, I got it! The little whisper in my head "there has to be a connection between Samoans and Khmer" turned out to be spot on!
Thai Khmer
Cambodian KhmerYou tell me if you haven't
seen those cheekbones
on the streets of Apia!
And there's definitely "An Excellent Adventure" in finding what what Khmer DNA is doing in Samoa and nowhere else in the Pacific. There would be a story!
I'm an Ancient History teacher, right, and this is the sort of thing I love above anything else. Ancient mysteries! Mmmm-mmmh! Give me one of those and I'm there! And, naturally, since it's a mystery, I've spent over twenty years researching the roots of the Polynesian people, and I intend to write to Nathan and Oscar to tell them where they went wrong and hopefully they'll go get another grant to make a sequel, "Made in Indonesia".
The mythic land of Hawaii-iki, where Polynesians say they originally came from, is NOT Taiwan. It's in Indonesia! The Molucca Islands in Indonesia to be specific. There's a LOT of evidence for this, and I think Nathan and Oscar got it wrong and Taiwan is simply a red-herring; that the Moluccans ended up in Taiwan, just as they ended up spread out throughout the Pacific; Taiwan is just another canoe-flotilla from the original Moluccan breeding ground.
I would like to go into this here, but this posting is about the NZ Film Festival, so I won't get distracted. It's all for another posting and on another day.
Still, "Made in Taiwan: Nathan and Oscar's Excellent Adventure" is an excellent film and a lot of fun. Oscar is hilarious! Like when they're in the Cook Islands and they're told "We think of ourselves like the Maori's big brother!" Oscar says "Does that mean we get to take your keys and use your car?" Love it!
So, there's still another weekend for you to see these films and I highly recommend you do so. Good, good fun! The latest crop of Kiwi films are a blast, so make sure you "go have a squiz"!
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