PAPEETE, Tahiti -Under the merciful shade of a pavilion in the central plaza near the McDonald’s restaurant, a disc jockey is tuning up a heavy beat. As teens mill during their school lunch period, a few boys burst into a breakdance, their arms and legs whirling to the lyrics of American and reggae rappers.
Postcards still depict Tahiti as a sleepy getaway, home of fruity soft drinks, women in flowered mumus and bare-chested men in outrigger canoes.
But Polynesians, much like their neighbors elsewhere in Oceania, are rapidly succumbing to globalization. Although Oceania spans eight time zones and tens of thousands of square miles, island groups are less isolated than ever from each other -both economically and politically.
International trade barriers are falling, and iconic cultural influences from the United States, France and the United Kingdom flash across vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean at the click of a television remote.
Here in the adopted home of the French post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin, where the myth and lore of much of Pacific culture resides, a small but growing film industry is helping to document the unfolding change.
This port city was the site of the 4th annual Documentary Film Festival of Oceania from Jan. 30 to Feb. 3. The event had 18 films in the competitive category. Organizers also screened 13 other films. The films came from 110 documentaries submitted to the festival selection committee.
The movies came from or featured matters pertaining to New Zealand, Australia, French Polynesia, Hawaii, New Caledonia, Nauru, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea and Easter Island. Some depicted the lives Pacific Islanders dwelling in France, which had a large colonial empire in this part of the world.
The films portrayed the loss of wildlife, cultural identity and oral history traditions, as well as the clash of old and new. Several films depicted the sometimes-uneasy relationship these islands have with their former colonial masters, Australia and multinational mining corporations.
Madeleine Carter, a producer with the Washington, D.C.-based National Geographic Society, served as a festival juror.
“An underlying theme in almost all of the films was salvaging the culture,” she noted in an interview. Carter was delighted to be a juror.
“I have a personal interest,” she said, “because my great grandfather was from Polynesia, from Hawaii.”
One of the festival films was from Hawaii. It depicted how in 1893 four boatloads of American troops invaded the Hawaiian islands and forced the queen of Hawaii to surrender her throne.
The documentary “Australian Atomic Confession” portrayed atmospheric testing by Britain of atomic bombs in Australia in the early 1950s and the consequent radiation sickness and death of aborigines. White Australian soldiers, who were exposed after the British told them there would be no danger, have formed a veterans survivor group and were interviewed in the documentary.
A light-hearted, 45-minute film from New Zealand titled “Made in Taiwan” follows two men of Polynesian and Maori roots, Nathan Rarere and Oscar Knightley, as they track their ancestry through DNA analysis back through the Cook Islands, Samoa and Vanuatu to Taiwan.
Before the Chinese began populating Taiwan, the men learn, the island was dominated by indigenous coastal peoples whose DNA is common in several Pacific Island ethnic groups.
One “Made in Taiwan” scene that drew laughs from the audience occurred when Knightley informed his mother, a white woman, about her genealogy. She had only known about her family history in Cornwall, England, before she emigrated to New Zealand. So, she was surprised to learn that her genealogy stretched back to ancestors who departed North America toward Asia and Europe via the Bering Straits.
“Made in Taiwan” captured the festival’s grand prize.
“That film’s going to be so good for the swabbing industry,” she said about the cheek swab procedure used to capture DNA.
The jury awarded special prizes to “Tjibaou, the Forgiveness,” a documentary depicting two widows attempting to heal divisions 15 years after civil strife on New Caledonia, and “Mr. Pattern,” the story of a white teacher’s attempt to alleviate impoverished conditions of aborigines in rural, central Australia.
Carter, who is with the geographic society’s international division, said the films had important messages, but she said she found several of them to be slow moving. Still, she added, “We at the National Geographic channel don’t have enough films on this stuff.”
She guessed that several of the film subjects could get a broader hearing if they had “a slightly more commercial pacing and slightly less academic narrative.”
Nonetheless, she added, “I just learned so much.”
The Third Person 