Quotes of the Day

For a 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's no mistaking her unbridled energy. In 1974, when Urale was five, her parents moved the family from their small village of Fagamalo to Wellington, in search of a better education for their six kids. "All Pacific Islanders' dream was to go to these places," she recalls, "where they thought the footpaths were paved with gold." Some migrants would find both more and less than they expected; others would arrive at a creative life, where the memory of their homeland would become grist for their art. In many ways, these souls are still in transit. The rhymes of Bill Urale, the Auckland rap star also known as King Kapisi, echo out across the Pacific: "You are immersed in a vision cultivated by this Samoan / Strong is my brethren Samoa mo Samoa…" And as a filmmaker, his sister Sima projects an image of her homeland just as fixed and fervent. "You can never lose that bond," she says.

As a child growing up on the island of Savaii, an hour's ferry ride and a world away from Apia, the capital, Sima recalls "chasing after cars, because it was such an unusual sight. And kids are still chasing after cars." These days, Urale does her chasing with the camera. In 1992, after realizing the world wasn't going to come to her as an actor, Urale enrolled at Melbourne's renowned Swinburne film school (now the Victorian College of the Arts). To help raise funds for her studies, friends and family pulled together to organize a "Cyclone Sima" appeal, and their faith in the fledgling filmmaker proved prophetic.

After graduating in 1994, 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, the film offered a strikingly dark view of Samoan life. "She wants to undo that happy haven idea of the Pacific," says Suhanya Raffel, head of Asian, Pacific and International Art at the Queensland Art Gallery, which will showcase Urale's work at next year's Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, "to look at much deeper social issues." To the heavy subject of euthanasia Urale next lent a winning mix of lightness and grace in her short Still Life (2001), which brought her more trophies, 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."

In between O Tamaiti and Still Life, the serious filmmaker let down her hair in Velvet Dreams (1997), a playful documentary about the mid-20th century school of white painters who rendered dusky Pacific maidens on black velvet. Splicing interviews with anthropologists, art critics and a memorable Reverend Mua, who "rarely gets to meet topless women in his line of work," over a soundtrack of Hawaiian slide guitar and a fictional detective narrator, Urale wittily debunks the myth of flower-behind-the-ear Polynesian womanhood. Yet through her lens, she can see both sides of the beach. "The really neat thing," she says, "is that I've got these different cultures that I totally embrace. I love the freedom that I get with Western values and ideals. And then I really love and appreciate the Samoan side of our culture."

That Samoan side Urale is ready to explore in her much-anticipated first feature, which she hopes to start shooting soon. Last July, she won a Fulbright residency at the University of Hawaii, where she polished her latest draft of Moana, about an urban Polynesian family's rediscovery of their pre-colonial myths. As a visual storyteller, whose modern-day fables have the weight of traditional Samoan fagogo, or fairytales, Urale has already begun that process, drawing new audiences around the projector's campfire. "I love social issues - that's why I make films," she says. "Because I want to change the world. Move people. Make an impact." You can feel Cyclone Sima's power starting to unfurl.

• Michael Fitzgerald
• Filmaker Siam Urale re-views Samoa