Child's eye view of a new world

While bro'Town's satirical portrait of Polynesian life in New Zealand has provided some hilarious insights, Sima Urale's short film Te Tamaiti (The Children) brings some of the realities of modern Polynesian parenting into focus.

Samoa's first female director, Urale moved to Wellington with her family in 1974, when she was six. The sister of Bill Urale (aka rapper King Kapisi), she directed the videos for his first two singles, Subcranium Feeling and Reverse Resistance.

Cliff Curtis, who studied acting with Urale, has described her as "New Zealand's most exciting talent in film".

An impressive directorial debut, O Tamaiti (1996) was made on returning to New Zealand after studying film for three years in Australia and it has won eight international awards.

At only 15 minutes, it is a microcosm of cultural adaptation from a child's perspective. Filmed in moody black and white with dramatically spare use of sound, it focuses on 11-year-old Tino, who looks after his siblings while his parents juggle shiftwork.

Adults are seen from the waist down, rarely seen or speaking. Like Gregor Nicholas' slice-of-life short, Avondale Dogs, also showing in Mixed-Up Childhood, it foregrounds how children cope while parents deal with their own problems.

Poignant and sobering with a dreamy pace, O Tamaiti still captures the boisterous antics of young children as scene after scene snowballs into the next, changing tempo without missing a beat, seamlessly connecting tears and comic talcum powder disasters while moving from hospital to the bedroom to the beach to church.

She is now working on her first feature, Moana, which explores traditional and contemporary Polynesian stories in an urban context. The first draft of the script was completed at the University of Hawaii after she was awarded the inaugural $40,000 Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer's Residency.

Exhibition

*What: O Tamaiti, by Sima Urale in Mixed-Up Childhood

*Where and when: New Gallery to May 22