French Polynesian film festival expected to be biggest yet
The organiser of French Polynesia's annual FIFO Pacific documentary film festival says the programme for this year's eleventh event is the biggest yet.
Transcript
The organiser of French Polynesia's annual FIFO Pacific documentary film festival says the programme for this year's eleventh event is the biggest yet.
Mereamo Vono says the event, which begins in two weeks, is one of the biggest annual events in Tahiti and will bring significant money into the local economy.
She told Jamie Tahana that she's expecting this year's festival to attract tens of thousands of people.
MEREAMO VONO: We are going to have people from New Zealand, Australia, New Caledonia, Tahiti and France of course, and we are going to have a projecton of documentaries and also pictures, short documentaries and conferences, and also the Fijian Conference of the Ocean and People.
JAMIE TAHANA: It's the eleventh year of the festival, I mean is it growing? How much bigger is this one going to be than previous ones?
MV: Yeah, actually it's growing year after year. And this year for one example, we have a lot of directors and producers coming and also we are going to have a lot of meeting of people who are organising the festival in the Pacific. People from New Zealand but also from Australia and from Hawaii, because we all want to coordinate all the festivals that we are organising for better exhibition of our culture, because FIFO is about documentaries of Pacific people. And also we have a lot of conferences, we are going to deal about all these questions. We have the pleasure to meet Mr Witi Ihimaera, the New Zealand author. And for an example he is going to make a conference about his work that was adapted to the screening. And so FIFO is going bigger because more of the documentaries also have a lot of questions, talking about, dealing about children.
JT: And that's one of the main aspects of this isn't it, a film festival about the Pacific people.
MV: Yeah well, this year we've received a lot of films from New Caledonia. Because as you know it's an important year for them because they have big elections and electoral elections for New Caledonian people, so mainly we are going to talk about this issue for them. We have a lot of directors from New Caledonia who are going to come and they are going to talk about the future of islands. So there is also a cultural but also political discussion around the future of people of Oceania.
JT: How big is FIFO for French Polynesia?
MV: Well, first it's one of the biggest cultural events in Tahiti because we have Heiva, which is the dance festival and then we have the FIFO. We have the Tahitian people who are very interested in documentaries. During the FIFO we have more than 20,000 people coming to see the films and that's quite big because it's more than 10,000 of the population. So it's very important to the Tahitian people. Also there is of course an economic aspect because we receive people from the region, from the Pacific, but also from France.
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