Word: samoan
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...still stands unmatched," he concludes. So in this postcolonial age, are we ready to revisit Stevenson? A rereading of his novella The Beach of Fales? (1892), the only completed work in a planned series on cross-cultural encounters, suggests so. Peopled with dyspeptic traders, white-suited missionaries and superstitious Samoan villagers, it blends mythical tales with sea stories, achieving a heightened realism that critiques the colonial experience. An earlier story completed before his travels is thought to have provided Joseph Conrad with his famous last words for Kurtz, "The horror! The horror!" and The Beach of Fales? is Stevenson...
...epic The Mango's Kiss dramatizes the encounter between a village girl, Pele, loosely based on Wendt's grandmother, and a Scottish novelist called Leonard Roland Stenson. Is he a sympathetic character? "Hell, yes," says Wendt. "In the novel, he leaves his library of books to the young Samoan woman - it didn't actually happen in real life." Instead, metaphorically at least, he bequeathed them to a nation...
...child of the pacific diaspora, it seemed a perfect place to meet: amidst the clamor and conveyor belts of Auckland Airport. This year 1,100 Samoans will officially migrate to New Zealand, swelling the ranks of the estimated 115,000 of their countrymen - two out of five Samoans - who live there. Sima Urale is one of them. To identify herself at the airport meeting, "from a million islanders flying out and arriving that same day," she's sent through a passport photo of herself - though when she turns up, hair cascading over a tracksuit top and jeans, there...
...Urale moved back to Wellington to shoot O Tamaiti (1996). A 15-min. short filmed in black and white and with barely a word of dialogue, it showed cinema's ability to shift perceptions, if not mountains. Innovatively shot from the perspective of an 11-year-old Samoan boy called Tino, as he struggles to bring up his five siblings on a housing estate while his parents are busy making money and more babies, O Tamaiti (The Children) took out the coveted Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, a first for a Pacific Islander director. Hinting at domestic violence...
...including top prize at the Montreal Film Festival. The filmmaker focused on an elderly white couple slowly drowning under the weight of illness, neglect from their children, and love for each other. But Urale's tenderness and respect for the aged (her camera caresses their wrinkled skin) are typically Samoan. More a cautionary tale than a call for euthanasia, "it hits a real nerve with people," the director says. "And particularly it reminds people to go see their parents. Give them a call. Go drop round a piece of cake or something. Don't forget about your parents...