In a few days, on July 1st the borders of Solomon Islands will open, after a long period of restrictions (since March 2020). As a researcher based within the country, I have mixed emotions about it. The day after Cyclone Harold in April 2020, I was on the campus of Solomon Islands National University looking … Read more →

In a few days, on July 1^st the borders of Solomon Islands will open, after a long period of restrictions (since March 2020). As a researcher based within the country, I have mixed emotions about it.

The day after Cyclone Harold in April 2020, I was on the campus of Solomon Islands National University looking at the damage to offices and equipment caused from the high waves. A fellow academic from the neighbouring office wandered over to where I stood on the sand and we stared out at the sea (now calm).

He told me he’d just been hired to head up a research project that was formerly to be done by an overseas academic. We both had invites to have one on one meetings with the overseas academic on a visit to Solomons, meetings both of us wondered whether were worthwhile, information would be extracted from us, but for whose benefit? Now, that visit had been cancelled due to closed borders, my friend had been hired to conduct the interviews and the analysis. “Maybe this situation will be good for us” he said, meaning local and locally based people. We laughed the sort of laugh you have after a day of tension during the disaster.

He was right, the closed border was good for us. With the combination of travel restrictions due to COVID19, the black lives matter and various decolonization movements becoming more prominent, it seemed like more researchers, aid and development agencies were talking a new language, words like “decolonizing”, and “localizing” flew about in meetings, as overseas professionals scrambled to recalculate work for “local”, “indigenous”, “locally based” and “area based”, rather than overseas staff.

After the initial economic shock of COVID19, all of my friends in the development and research sector had work, created by the closed border situation. I felt like a recruitment consultant, fielding anything from 3 to 10 requests a week for people to do jobs on the ground, recommending people and doing countless references. It took a little later, but other sectors came on board, like the media, with local rather than foreign journalists producing the stories on international news networks.

Local people through negotiation and necessity took on higher responsibilities than before, some also negotiated better pay and conditions, pointing directly or indirectly to the gender and racial biases that afflict aid, particularly in the labyrinth of donors paying the contracting agency paying the local consultant working with the local agency that hides ultimate responsibility for the cleaves in power that arise. “Charge big!” “negotiate!” “they’ll have so much underspent travel money this year, spend it” I told friends and they laughed but they also built up their allies to do just that. Networks of professionals arose, meetings were held to share problems, and associations of professionals that had been stale and self interested, became more vibrant and useful to their members.

Local professionals were visible, paid well, better networked and more vocal about issues such as funding models, research methods, hiring biases and other structural constraints they’d faced in the past. It was a good time to be a local linked internationally, but it was still a bad time to be a local.

The economy shrunk, joblessness and crime grew, shortages of food through reduced domestic and international trade was a concern, medical services were woefully ill prepared and everyone knew the State of Emergency could be used to stifle criticism if the powers that be so chose. Add to that natural disasters, periodic shutdowns of various services and businesses, and political dissent over the government’s approach to diplomatic and economic affairs and it was a time of worrying. We worried a lot, about the day to day matters like getting food, Panadol, antimalarial medications, power and internet cuts, and about the future, “where is the country heading?” being a common topic of conversation and its conclusion.

There is that saying about Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, how the feminine dancer Ginger did everything Fred did while also being in heels and dancing backwards. I often feel like local researchers do the same working day as foreign professionals while the internet and power cuts out, fielding calls about funerals or family needing loans, monitoring the latest disaster warning and helping a friend navigate what to do about her corrupt boss.

I have stopped making of lists of issues that arise each day in person, on my phone and on my messenger and how random they are. Crisis management is not episodic but as regular as sipping tea, and just as regularly people joke about it, but have little time to dwell. The connectedness that is the joy of living in the islands is also a dull ache, especially in islands in poverty, conflict and political strife.

So, now, July 1^st is coming. The “internationals” will be booking their trips to Solomon Islands, to do the backlog of work that is there to be done but will the dynamics have changed? They’ll have anecdotes and new phones and apps that make me laugh at my untechnological self, I am looking forward to seeing some of them. I think of George Soros and the need for open societies, Solomon Islands being closed has narrowed politics for sure, and can often fuel dictatorships, maybe open borders will open new ideas and opportunities as well. Don’t write them off, I think to myself about the internationals, neither locals or internationals have all the answers so there needs to be an exchange, and one day soon I too will travel. The visitors to Solomons will be friendly and generous, “we’ll have coffee”.

I got an email from a researcher, he’s coming to do interviews for a “case study”, he says it with great certainty and confidence. I react to myself: Cannot local researchers do a case study? What good is being a “case” in someone else’s study these days? Has nothing changed the past 2 years? I feel a sense of frustration rising, leave the email unanswered and close my computer.

I look out at the airport, all that uninhabitated space of runaway tarmac, surrounded by roadside markets and houses. The borders are opening, but will opportunities for locals shut down? And our minds, how are our minds? Are they wide enough to see that borders can be chosen, and in our choices we all birth these invisible lines, throbbing with power, lines that separate locality and mobility, in our professions and our lives.

Dr Anouk Ride www.anoukride.com

Communications products are seen as the burps of the development sector – after the project recipe is finalised, some activities are underway, an agreed set of communications products will be defined and burped out, a result of the “main meal” which is the project activities. As burps, there is often less foresight and planning, and … Read more →

Communications products are seen as the burps of the development sector – after the project recipe is finalised, some activities are underway, an agreed set of communications products will be defined and burped out, a result of the “main meal” which is the project activities. As burps, there is often less foresight and planning, and the idea amongst the project designers that “anyone” can do it: project staff often having communications added to the list of their other tasks.

I’ve been working in this field in different capacities for around twenty years, as a journalist on the receiving end of these burps, as a communications officer making materials as required by my employer, and as a researcher trying to evaluate the effects of communications on individuals or groups of people’s knowledge, behaviour change, or particular attitudes. The following is my distillation of what I have learnt being surrounded by the many communication burps of the development sector.

The easiest mistake to make doing communications in development sector is to not understand your audience: what their knowledge level is, what they care about, what information sources they trust and what kinds of information they want and need. Some good examples of investing in understanding your audience in Solomon Islands, where I live, include Information in Natural Disasters, a report in which communications materials were tested with disaster affected communities to find out useful information like people did not want to be talked down to, disliked cartoons as a form of communication about serious issues and thought hiding under the table during an earthquake was terrible advice.

What NGO workers assume people know, think and how they communicate can be different from reality, and, in a culturally diverse population like Solomon Islands, it is imperative to check how messages are received. For instance, I was involved in Solomon Islands’ first social marketing study into attitudes and communication on violence against women and girls. We talked to 200 people across different cultures and situations and found that local people had many messages that they thought worked to stop or prevent violence – 324 messages but almost all of them different from those used by iNGOs. We need more organisations to tap into local messages that work, rather than trying to design slogans from head office. Messages identified from that piece of research that were seen as most effective in preventing or stopping violence are now being spread through mass communications to address high rates of family violence.

The second easiest mistake is to forget about the audience and please your boss. If you work for an organisation in which your managers believe you have to explain in each communication the organisation, the project aims, the Sustainable Development Goals and whatever higher-level policy led to the project, you will have little room to actually communicate your message.

The third most common mistake is not to test communications products using research. As a result, what the donor and development management professionals think is great, is often what is least effective and appropriate. For example, individual “success” stories or “faces” of particular issues that “personalise the issue”. Often international NGOs believe that an individual woman talking will inspire women in the audience to achieve, advocate or act on an issue. However, my own internal testing indicates Solomon women will often focus in on following features of the person profiled: their education (particularly if they were schooled overseas, or at a private school), influential people the woman is related to (usually politicians or former politicians) and their ethnicity or tribe’s status. That woman is judged relationally before her message is heard, and often status and relationality can overtake message in what is retained by the audience. Younger women will talk about how young women who speak publicly take the risk of any small “mistake”, like wearing certain clothes or posting something frivolous on Facebook, is amplified and used to shame and humiliate them. “Inspiration” stories can work, but they need to be pitched right and tested properly, to avoid negative flak for the people profiled, who may be unprepared to be the “face” of climate change, or gender equality or whatever topic in the story.

The final mistake in development communications is to be so creative that you are creating another world rather than designing communications for the real world. This often happens when expatriate communications staff are riding the “innovation” and “technology” wave, to get funding for new communication outputs. For instance, some of the more ridiculous pitches I have heard in development meetings the last ten years include “street art” in Pacific villages (until it was pointed out most people live in houses made out of timber and dried leaf panels, with few fences, so there were no public walls to adorn with spray paint). Another idea was to build a computer generated “person” or “bot” that women violence survivors could call for advice (when many women in violent relationships do not have their own personal phones and also have apprehension about using services that needs breaking down through human interaction).

Communications in the development sector will probably always be relegated to the burps, but a good burp (or series of ones) can be deeply satisfying. Communications that release local messages, in the most appropriate format, using pre-existing modes of communication and information sharing can be useful for knowledge and social change.

Dr Anouk Ride is a researcher on aid, development, conflict and social inclusion, and is based in Solomon Islands. She is an Affiliate Researcher with Australian National University and a Social Scientist with WorldFish.

Originally published on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/development-communications-how-burp-well-dr-anouk-ride/

Recently I have been spending less time on Facebook and more time on LinkedIn and my outlook on life is better for it. The shift started earlier this year, there were two events in my social circle that made me realise Facebook is destructive, particularly for women’s self-esteem, solidarity and respect. The first one was … Read more →

Recently I have been spending less time on Facebook and more time on LinkedIn and my outlook on life is better for it. The shift started earlier this year, there were two events in my social circle that made me realise Facebook is destructive, particularly for women’s self-esteem, solidarity and respect.

The first one was an acquaintance who was having an extra marital affair (all the while posting ‘happy family’ pictures of her and her children on Facebook). The happy family photos and all the comments made me feel uneasy, and then it got worse when the affair was finally out in public, of course a lot of people defriended the woman and posted hate comments and ridicule about her on other people’s pages. Yes, this acquaintance made a mistake and a fairly colossal one, but rather than talk to her about it, all her friends and family spent hours on Facebook posting venomous spurts into the internet’s thin air. I did not agree with what she did, but I began to feel sorry for her, she may not have any idea that her closest friends were re-posting her selfies and calling her a whore.

The second one was a female acquaintance who won an award and since it was self-nominated process there was a lot of controversy around whether she was a ‘deserving’ recipient of the award. Again, rather than having a discussion directly about this, people vented on Facebook, behind her back, often the same people that made positive posts on her own page congratulating her on winning the award were then posting on a different page suggesting she did not deserve the award, was entitled and self-promoting, was of the wrong age, ethnic background etc, etc.

It made me doubt the sincerity of people on Facebook, and doubt myself as well. Were Facebook “friends” a bunch of people using their posts to hide their two faces? If someone congratulated me on something, was it sincere? If I made a mistake in my life at any point, how would I be treated online, would it be the same as these two women were treated? What gossip or jokes did people say about me on Facebook? It sent me into a bit of a tailspin.

Then I thought, what impact would something like this make on a teenage girl? It was an eye-opener on how destructive Facebook could be, damaging people’s ability to trust others, their own self-esteem, their own lives. This is in addition to all the other risks of Facebook for young girls – type in “Facebook” and “girls” into a search engine and a long list of “girl drugged”, “girl tricked” and sexual content will soon be revealed. And there is the pressure of living a “Facebook-worthy” appearance, I mean looking perfect and being ready for a selfie or Facebook pic at all times, as you can never escape friends taking them, photos being posted and then being judged in multiple ways – not pretty, too sexy, looking old, looking photoshopped, too this, too that.

But I am rather addicted to social media, just a few minutes in the morning or at the 3pm energy slump, to expose myself to a bit of inspiration and ideas and take a brain break from work. So, I turned to LinkedIn instead. I made a rule that I could spend around 15 minutes a day on Linkedin and only go on Facebook to see if anyone had left me a message.

LinkedIn was like visiting a world which was the complete opposite of Facebook. On Facebook, women post photos seeking compliments of how they LOOK. On LinkedIn women post about what they are DOING seeking feedback, recognition and connections (compliments come too of course but it is about their work, their passions, not their hair). On LinkedIn EVERY DAY there were posts about successful women being shared, on Facebook that was rare. On LinkedIn, I found connections to people based on my ideas and work, on Facebook a lot of the connections were about friends stalking other friends. On LinkedIn, I could happily accept invites from men I had never met, knowing they were interested in my work, not in sending me suggestive messages when they were bored which was always a risk with Facebook. The hacking of accounts in LinkedIn seems rare, in Facebook hacking is a daily occurance, Prime Ministers and Presidents are not immune from it.

LinkedIn is a social media network with etiquette. People post about their work, ideas and inspiration. There are always a few that are not polite – there was one LinkedIn acquaintance who posted about her naked boyfriend, and another that posted about what they were having for lunch – both rather flippant posts that sit in isolation from the other interesting debates and discussions on LinkedIn – but in my experience so far, 99% of users are not like that. Apart from that one naked boyfriend post (which I should clarify was words not photos), I have never seen any sexual content on LinkedIn. It is one of the few forums on the internet where women and girls can be valued primarily for their ideas and achievements.

People are there to make genuine connections. Yes, I know, LinkedIn arose primarily as a way to network for work purposes, to know people who could get you jobs, promotions, clients and the like. And it’s a good idea not to accept invitations from people not in your field of work who look like they are friending people for marketing purposes. But I have found a lot of the dialogue is not necessarily about self promotion and marketing, it is about finding like-minded and different people and talking about practices, processes, goals and achievements in particular fields of work. I discovered through LinkedIn that some of my friends I’d connected because they were distant family, or had kids at my kids’ school for example, had similar outlooks to me on what is effective aid, how to foster social inclusion in policy and supported gender equity at work. I was able to get to know much more about them. For people I didn’t know so well, I could see the attitudes and approaches of people before I worked with them, through looking at their LinkedIn posts of what they liked and what they had achieved. Since I work as a research consultant, and jump around from one organisation to another, it was a way to keep in touch with projects and staff I had worked with before and how they were doing. People wrote to me for advice and shared stories, I responded and felt connected and valued.

The advertising and sponsored content is also profoundly different in nature. Firstly, there is much less of it, and secondly it’s based on your work field, so it can be quite useful to know about what the World Economic Forum is doing, or what are the top ranking universities are this year, which is what you find in sponsored content on LinkedIn. On Facebook, I get ads about washing detergent and clothes (I can’t remember if Facebook asked me what I was interested in, but I guarantee you it isn’t washing detergent!)

These days I am encouraging young women to spend less time on Facebook and go on LinkedIn, especially those who work on issues like violence, conflict and social exclusion like I do. Such work can be isolating and stressful and it helps to learn from what others do, share ideas and celebrate small successes dealing with monumental problems. I can see there are very active LinkedIn members who are women in science, technology and engineering and probably other male-dominated fields too, and I can understand why. Positive reinforcement from people who have the same challenges as you do helps keep you going.

I might be optimistic, but I hope the future of women and girls is the reality I have experienced on LinkedIn. There are only so many females that can survive mainly on their looks, and beautiful Facebook selfies. We need our work, our wits and a supportive environment to achieve our best, and LinkedIn can help.

p.s. if you want to be linked this is me:

The acclaim for Tanna, a film shot on the Vanuatuan island of the same name, continues into 2017, with its recent nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. Cinematically beautiful, shot with a relatively small crew from Australia, the film tells a story of a young woman whose marriage is arranged while she … Read more →

The acclaim for Tanna, a film shot on the Vanuatuan island of the same name, continues into 2017, with its recent nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars.

Cinematically beautiful, shot with a relatively small crew from Australia, the film tells a story of a young woman whose marriage is arranged while she wants to marry her lover, another young man from the tribe. The real life events (resembling in the film, a Pacific version of Romeo and Juliet) eventually led the Yakel tribe to allow love marraiges in the 1980s.

The local actors were adept at portraying the emotions and push and pull of culture and love, despite being untrained and first-time actors. The media often tinged their praise for the acting with a note of surprise – however, anyone who has worked with Pacific Islanders in film is aware its not such a rare experience to see raw acting talent able to channel experiences and emotions.

The surprise comes in part from the way the “traditional” was played up in the media, suggesting people on Tanna had never seen a camera before or had much contact with the outside world. The connection of the tribe with a worship of Prince Philip also continued the presentation of people on Tanna as having some quaint, old world ideas (e.g. in the Independent ). (I was in the UK when Princess Diana died, the level of fervour and superstition around the royal family then outweighed anything coming out of Tanna!)

The idea of Tanna as living in this “traditional” “closed from outside world” or “quaint” state was more fictional than the film of course, as pointed out by Professor of Anthropology Lamont Lindstrom . Lindstrom details how the local people were told by a photographer to take off their “Western” clothes in the 1970s for photographs and how this developed into dressing traditionally (and doing other things differently) for tourists.

With its active volcano, Mount Yasur, Tanna is one of the main destinations for tourists visiting Vanuatu, with locals making use of this opportunity for small incomes and many Tanna islanders have mobile phones, houses, Western clothes and the like. Documentary crews have often been drawn to locations on Tanna where people are more “traditional” (as reported by SMH)

For the film Tanna, the Yakel crew walked the red carpet in traditional dress – a vision stunning and sometimes strange (bare breasted female islanders in cold temperatures, in many photos all the women had their arms crossed over their breasts, in an attempt to keep warm or cover up). The traditions of the tribe were highlighted visually, but unlike other films, in which the actors and director give interviews, for Tanna the directors remained the mouthpiece for the story the film during interviews, explaining the film and the process by which it was made.

Whether the film directors Bentley Dean and Martin Butler will be seen, as argued by Lindstrom, as similar to Jean Jacques Rousseau (romanticising Tahitians into images of “noble savages”), or progressive film-makers remains to be seen. As I’ve argued earlier , the bar for being inclusive of local cultures is set low in the film industry.

Positive reviews for the film praise the cinematography, acting and the sensitive approach to work with an indigenous tribe. Being documentary filmmakers, Dean and Butler, essentially did what documentary filmmakers do – live with the tribe while shooting and writing the story – but it is seen as a novel approach to feature film making.

The community worked with them on the story, identified actors for roles, story elements and improvisation, with the results that local Yakel leaders, according to Dean and Butler, feel the film is “theirs”. On the other hand, despite Vanuatu having a thriving writers’ scene (including writers fluent in French and English) and many experienced film technicians (thanks in large part to Australian and New Zealand aid to produce a drama series Love Patrol) there are no Vanuatuan credits in the script, direction or camera/sound roles. Even the music composition was done in Australia (again surprising given the local music scene).

An interesting question is then raised by the title of the film: Tanna. It’s a bit like setting a film in Wollongong and then calling the film “Australia” or setting the film in Miami and calling the film “United States of America”. The film is the story of one tribe, the Yakel, but the majority of tribes on the island of Tanna live with different histories and customs. While they may know the story depicted in the film it is not “their story”. However, the name suggests it is a story owned by the island, and therefore all its peoples. Some other tribes reportedly refused to be involved and it will be interesting to see if resentment arises if the Yakel tourism activities increase in popularity and a relative rise in income (compared to the other tribes) because of the film.

My feelings about the film remain mixed because of all these unanswered questions. It is a cinematic achievement, beautiful to watch and worth seeing. It was amazing to see a Melanesian community depicted in their environment dealing with complicated issues of gender, culture, relations between communities, relations between elders and youth. There were certain points in the film (like when the grandmother reproaches her granddaughter about her reluctance to get married with a dose of humour and guilt) which felt as though they authentically captured a common Pacific experience. However, there was also something missing in the complexity of the story, which I think could have been added through the participation of local writers. While it is often compared to Romeo and Juliet because of its key dramatic events, Romeo and Juliet is a drama while Tanna remains simpler, more of a fable.

There was a missed opportunity for the few film-makers in Vanuatu to work on their country’s first foray into feature film. If any local writers or film-makers wanted to make a film situated on Tanna it will forever be compared to the film with the same name and probably seen in the international industry as a topic which “has been done”. Hopefully some local film-makers will be able to use the interest in the film Tanna to hook funding and other support to their upcoming projects, maybe even presenting a counterpoint to Tanna’s romantic tragedy with stories that challenge Westerners about their beliefs, attitudes and behaviour towards indigenous peoples. (The potential and down-sides of tourism and the purchase of seaside holiday homes by expatriates from Australia and France – which removes chiefs and locals from land ownership of these aresa –  would be a great documentary for local film-makers to take on for example).

Right now Tanna is seen as “exceptional” because the film-makers took the time to live in the local community, understand their history and work with them to depict it in a feature film. All of this is laudable, but I sincerely hope this “exception” does not become the norm. If Australians, New Zealanders and other Western film crews write, direct and shoot all the international feature films shot in the Pacific, we’re going to have to a new genre: “noble savage” films, but not new forms of representation and empowerment of islanders through films. The next step, a truly “exceptional” step, is to work with Islanders so they can tell their stories themselves, and we can see what results from a deeper level of ownership of the film-making process.

One of the first people to see the upcoming Disney movie Moana will probably be me.   Featuring a Pacific female lead, Moana, tells the story of a sea voyage by a young girl in search of a fabled island. I am one of those uncool people that watches animated feature films regularly and without shame. … Read more →

One of the first people to see the upcoming Disney movie Moana will probably be me.   Featuring a Pacific female lead, Moana, tells the story of a sea voyage by a young girl in search of a fabled island.

I am one of those uncool people that watches animated feature films regularly and without shame. I tell my highbrow friends that after a day researching not-so-cheery topics like natural disasters, violent conflict and child abuse, these films help me relax my brain. But actually this excuse is probably just a cover, these films actually are great stories, more sophisticated and difficult to realise than most people appreciate. The layers of story in an animated feature film is in fact exercising my brain on many levels.

Disney films have long been criticised for their monocultural approach, or their misappropriation of other cultures, through films such as Aladdin and Pocahontas. Moana, even prior to its release, has attracted criticisms about cultural sensitivity – over its cast, depictions of people (such as body shape), representation of spirits and myths, and most notoriously its products (a costume with skin tattoos was withdrawn after protest).

These debates reflect the fact that Polynesian writers, academics and artists are very vocal around identity and misrepresentation – one of the most strident criticisms of academic research comes from the region, Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s book “Decolonising Methodologies” and the work of one of the region’s renknowned fiction writers, Albert Wendt from Samoa, has strong themes of resistance to neo-colonialism and many forms of exploitation.

I can understand the criticisms of Moana but then there are also elements of this movie that are signs of greater respect and participation of Iocal people than has previously been the case. The cast includes islanders in the lead roles (albeit with easy to digest Americianised accents), islanders have been involved in the music (through the contributions of Igelese Ete and Opetaia Foa’i) and in the writing (Maori writer Taika David Waititi wrote the original script, probably the first Pacific Islander to work on a major animated film script). All of this should be celebrated as signs of progress from the days where non-Western stories were merely viewed as quaint “folktales” that could be taken by multinationals such as Disney and interpreted purely through their own American lenses.

However, as film is a visual medium, it makes me sad that Pacific artists and film-makers seem to have been left out of other areas of the artistic process. For instance, the kakamora[1], small extremely strong hairy human-like beings said to have lived in Makira, Solomon Islands, is depicted in the Moana movie trailer as a sort of cross between voodoo dolls made with coconuts and anime creatures. It would have been far more interesting for Pacific artists, such as those from Makira, to visually depict the kakamora and then have these animated, to share local perceptions of this wonderful creature with the world.

Much will be made of Moana being a role model for young women, as a strong female lead and it is indeed good to see a “Disney princess” in such an active and adventurous role. However, it is a shame that Hollywood’s obsession with lead characters and stories driven by individuals has been transplanted into a Pacific context through Moana. Pacific Islander societies are typically marked by a high degree of communal activity and a web of relationships through family, extended families and village settings. The great Polynesian voyages which the film draws on as a reference, were typically communal endeavours, not individuals setting out alone as in the case of Moana.

So, by making the voyage a journey of an individual rather than a group, the film misses an opportunity to represent the source of much drama in the Pacific – the web of loyalties, interpersonal politics, unspoken jealousies and conspiracies, affection and obligation in relations between people on small islands. Want drama? Don’t put one Islander on a boat, put 10 and watch the next political drama/soap opera unfold – intrigue, politics and humour is guaranteed!

However, a film about 10 Islanders on a boat could never be made in Hollywood and its not the creatives’ fault. It’s the way the film industry works and that leads me to perhaps the biggest flaw in Moana and its makers: it is not the small things like the characters or music, or even the script itself. It is this: there is no right of reply.

What I mean is that while Moana draws on Pacific culture for inspiration, Pacific Islanders are extremely unlikely to be able to make an animated feature film released on the world stage about their culture and stories. Actually the Polynesians may manage it. They at least have access to film schools in New Zealand and the United States- many Polynesian countries are still dependent on New Zealand, while other such as Tonga have carved out strong links with the US and have large Islander communities which have settled in Auckland and Honolulu. Islanders can access film funding through these old colonial links and residence in developed countries. But the Melanesians (Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands) are regularly exploited for their stories and regularly excluded from film-making opportunities.

I’ll give you an example from Solomon Islands, where the province of Makira is home to the fantastical kakamora. As a mingling point between the three subregions of the Pacific with communities of Polynesian, Micronesian and Melanesian peoples, Solomon Islands enjoys incredible cultural diversity, including a diversity of languages, stories, artistic traditions and music.

Foreign documentary film crews regularly visit to film all this, and regularly leave without having hired any Islanders to be involved in the story or film-making process. I know this first hand as I work as a film producer, specialising in Islander-directed stories, and I can’t tell you the number of times when I’ve been on the phone to a television network to argue for local people to be involved in the production process as assistant script writers, second cameramen or to provide music on international productions for example. The person on the other line will inevitably be falsely sympathetic and then tell me they “just need a stringer for now”. The marginalisation of Islanders from storytelling about their own cultures through film is maddening. At least if Moana is anything to go by, Disney is more open to collaboration with locals than the average international television network.

Which brings me back to Moana and the genre of animated feature films. The land of the kakamora, and the Solomon Islands in general, is blessed with self-taught and talented writers, film-makers, artists and musicians. But their chances of making an animated feature film are abysmal – there is no film or creative writing course available locally, no scholarships for film schools in other countries available to Solomon Islanders, and the few short training and festival opportunities that do exist are regularly taken up by civil servants and their mates rather than the real talents, because so many regional organisations insist on funnelling information and invitations through government. Other international organisations simply overlook the Pacific – despite development levels in many Pacific countries being on par to African countries, there is no regional film funding available to Pacific Islanders, unlike many laudable opportunities for creative African talent.

Even though I know Solomon films will compete with films from other countries which enjoy government funding, its unlikely the playing field will be level in my lifetime. Solomon Islands is highly aid dependent, a least developed country and reportedly in the bottom third of most corrupt countries in the world. Many locals comment that corruption is getting worse rather than better and the challenges to living and working in the arts sector are not likely to ease any time soon.

But Disney/Pixar, Dreamworks and Illumination MacGuff I actually have hope in making a positive contribution to supporting Islander story making. Ok, right now they are making steps to including local talent in their film productions about other cultures. It seems logical other steps can be taken to even the balance between the animation companies and local storytellers.

What about for the next film, having a scriptwriting competition for a short film from a developing country that would be released with the feature? What about bringing local artists and painters into the film production process to give more opportunity for visual representation of different cultures in animated feature films? What about a portion of profits from the mega-hits like Frozen going into a film fund for Indigenous peoples to make their own animated films and television shows? What about sponsoring collaborations between indigenous tribes to make films that would connect to indigenous youth from different parts of the world? What about scholarships and start-up funds for indigenous people to learn the technicalities of animation so more local people could start their own productions?

And yes, just in case you were wondering, the Pacific does consume animated feature films, particularly of course children and families. Having a backpack with “Frozen” characters on it is the fashion du jour for female school students in towns in Solomon Islands and “Ben 10” and “Spiderman” are popular for boys. It will be interesting to see if Moana becomes the new must-have schoolbag in 2017.

As for me, I will enjoy Moana as a chance to see some representations of the Pacific in my beloved genre of animated feature film. And I will be delighted one day if the film industry recognises what Islander film-makers are up against and provides the kind of opportunities and funding they need to set their stories to sail around the globe.

On a recent blog on Devpolicy, Dr Anouk Ride discusses how gender-based violence is framed in the Solomon Islands context and argues for a more nuanced policy and public debate on why men are violent, what role men and women have in legitimising this violence and, critically, how this can be changed. Read What’s culture … Read more →

On a recent blog on Devpolicy, Dr Anouk Ride discusses how gender-based violence is framed in the Solomon Islands context and argues for a more nuanced policy and public debate on why men are violent, what role men and women have in legitimising this violence and, critically, how this can be changed. Read What’s culture got to do with it? Causes of intimate partner violence: http://devpolicy.org/whats-culture-got-causes-intimate-partner-violence-20160413/?utm_source=Devpolicy&utm_campaign=88f43dc2f7-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_082b498f84-88f43dc2f7-312049145