Across the Pacific, a message from Oscar winner Sean Baker (Anora) has resonated with audiences packing cinemas to see the new Samoan-made Native film Tinā. In one of his Oscar acceptance speeches, Baker highlighted the importance of the communal experience of watching movies in a theater, especially in a world that can feel divided. To my mind, no other feature so far this year better reflects this spirit than Tinā.
The film is a classic fish-out-of-water story of a teacher who swoops in to save the school, except this time our hero is brown (Samoan, to be specific), not white, and the school is wealthy and privileged, not run-down and crime-ridden. What the Samoan school teacher, played by the ebullient Anapela Polataivao, brings is heart and soul, imbued with hope and healing through music: be it classical, modern or traditional Samoan.
I saw Tinā on opening night at my local Gaiety cinema in Wairoa, and the entire audience was sobbing by the end (don’t forget your tissues). I loved the film, but was puzzled by one thing: is it okay, in 2025, for a story to be centered around one brown person in a school that is largely white? I went to reviews and discovered, yes, it can work.
Members like Coscarcon, who saw the film at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, with a largely Samoan audience, speak specifically to this particular topic. They write: “There is a dynamic that smacks of cultural appropriation in the film as a mostly white choir of privileged school kids sing Samoan songs in a competition, but experiencing the Samoan reaction to the story and hearing the director (also Samoan) talk about this as an attempt at healing in society gets you thinking that maybe we get offended on behalf of others a bit too easily.”
Tinā is in general release in New Zealand and the Pacific, with a May release set for Australia. To date, the film has brought in over $2 million NZD at the box office, placing it firmly in that nation’s top ten of all-time homegrown features and bringing audiences back to cinemas in droves (including our very own former editor-in-chief Gemma Gracewood).
