Breaking barriers: filmmaker Vea Mafile’o

I’m to meet filmmaker Vea Mafile’o at her “studio”. Knowing other independent filmmakers, I imagine a small room, where she plans documentaries like her superb For My Father’s Kingdom (2019), and where maybe she edits her dramas, such as Lea Tupu’anga/Mother Tongue (a 2024 short film, written by its lead actor, Luciane Buchanan).

So, when I get to the “studio”, my jaw hits the floor; more specifically, it hits an ocean of diabolical 1970s brown carpet. The space, in Auckland’s Papatoetoe, is a bona-fide warehouse-sized film production studio, called the Taro Patch, complete with vintage Cabbage Patch doll, pink leis, and seven core personnel.

Place and process

Upstairs, Vea’s sister Bubzie Mafile’o has been helping people with lived experience of mental distress tell their own stories on video. The siblings have done similar work with inmates at Paremoremo prison. (Their other sister, Emily, is also a Visual Arts alumna and an artist and production designer.) Working alongside communities with “strenuous” lives is a studio specialty.

It’s a concept the Taro Patch creative team have taken international. For a project for the Hawai’i Triennial 2025 (HT25) contemporary art exhibition, they spent time in Waianae and Mākaha on the west coast of O’ahu, documenting stories from these communities. With Hawaiian filmmaker and surfer Pākē Salmon as their guide, their time included visiting actual taro patches and connecting with community efforts to regain food sovereignty.

As part of the HT25 project, the team also recreated a version of the Taro Patch studio as an installation, from which the stories screen. It’s about connecting place to process, says Vea.

“The main aim with the Taro Patch is that when people come in, they’re like, ‘I feel like I’m in my grandmother’s house’ or ‘I feel comfortable here’,” she says.
“We always put up these walls with institutions where people feel they have to behave in a different way. So, it’s about breaking down those walls so people feel comfortable to have real conversations.”

Art school beginnings

Brought up in Hamilton, Vea worked as a dive master in Tonga before she undertook a Bachelor of Visual Arts at the University of Auckland, graduating in 2006. She began, she says, wanting to paint like John Constable before moving into sculpture (creating rubber canoes out of old tyres) and making the acclaimed Digital Kava Circles video installation series. This featured interviews she conducted in Tonga in 2006 following the death of King Tāufaʻāhau Tupou IV: “There were the riots,” she recalls. “There was a lot to talk about.”

Thanks to internships undertaken during her degree, she jumped into the screen industry. She worked behind the scenes at Pacific Beat Street, as a reporter and director for Tagata Pasifika and by 2021, she was directing episodes of The Panthers mini-series. Her art study was “super helpful” in giving her the tools to contextualise her narratives and give them symbolic complexity.

As a self-described “nosy person”, however, her love is documentary. For My Father’s Kingdom documented her dad’s financial sacrifices for his church and, with a Tongan dad and a Pākehā mum, Vea has told her own stories to avoid people criticising her cultural understanding. “If you are just like, ‘well, this is my reality’, and then just hold up the mirrors, then no one can question you … If you’re standing in your authenticity, no one can say shit.”

Global success

Last year’s release of her short film Lea Tupu’anga/Mother Tongue was not only another personal professional milestone, but also a global one: it was the first Tongan film written and directed by Tongan women to gain entry to the Sundance Film Festival. A superb, complex piece about language trauma, it was chosen from 17,000 applications to screen at the famed festival in 2024.

The film has since screened at festivals everywhere from New York to Edinburgh to Tahiti, with Vea at times juggling attending premieres with travel to Tonga, Vanuatu, Canada and India filming episodes for TV series The Casketeers: Life and Death Around the World. She describes working with funeral directors Francis and Kaiora Tipene on the show as “one of the best times of my life”. The content of the show also caused her to again reflect on her own art practice, which often explores themes of death, afterlife and religion.

She’ll be travelling again this year, including spending time in Tonga filming the documentary she’s co-directing on the life of rugby legend Jonah Lomu.

With Hollywood increasingly turning its eye to Pacific stories, Vea wants to prevent money from just flying in and flying out. “We need enough Māori and Pasifika to crew the entire film set,” says Vea, who sees the Taro Patch playing a role in nurturing Pacific film talent.

Given all she has achieved so far, the goal seems well within reach.

Janet McAllister