It was tempting to expect that the first truly Samoan feature film - entirely in the Samoan language and written and directed by a Samoan - might have been a small and precious thing, worth praising more for the promises it made for the future than for its achievement in
its own right.
But it is no such thing: Tamasese's feature debut, which advances stylistic ideas rehearsed in his independently funded short film Va Tapuia (Sacred Spaces) is a powerful and impressive achievement, a sort of Pasifika High Noon, in which the weapons for the climactic duel are words, not six-shooters but in which the hero must stand tall if he is to triumph.
The impelling irony here is that the film's hero is a dwarf. Saili (Sagote) is a dirt-poor taro farmer, who lives in an isolated village with his wife Vaaiga (Pushparaj) and daughter Litia (Mataia) in domestic circumstances whose problematic history only slowly becomes clear.
It's best not to spell it out too plainly here, but Tamasese's screenplay, which is assembled with the precision of a veteran, puts plenty at stake for the main characters: both are outsiders in their own way but it's Saili who has to - quite literally - rise to the challenge and prove the bonds of love can sometimes trump those of blood.
It's an understatement to say that the film is deeply rooted in its location; it's actually synonymous with it because its cultural context is its meaning. Chieftainship and oratory (the film's Samoan name, O Le Tulafale, describes someone whose chiefly authority flows from his oratorical skill) is both part of the formal framework and the essence of the story: to be a hero, Saili must find his voice.
