Miki Magasiva fell in love with film at an early age and has finally launched a debut feature that takes a tragi-comic look at grief and families. Photo: Tony Nyberg
At the Hawai’i International Film Festival in October, where his debut feature film Tinā (Mother) opened, Miki Magasiva went for what he called his “pretty fruity” look.
Pretty fruity? Let’s go for full-on fruity. The suit fabric was silky and movie-starry. It was very purple, with hundreds of multicoloured daisies. The bottom half was a lavalava. He accessorised with flower leis and the ula fala, the red necklace made, appropriately, from the fruits of the pandanus tree. It is impossible to do it justice. Let’s just go for saying it is fabulously over the top and he looks fabulously flamboyant in it.
He looks capable of mischief. He isn’t. He says, disappointingly, while pretending to be disappointed in himself, that he always wanted to be a rebel but never achieved that particular goal. He has always been a “goody-two-shoes”.
He says he got lots of compliments at the Hawai’i do. Except from his family, who were “completely embarrassed”.
He decided to wear the get-up again for the film’s New Zealand premiere at the Civic in Auckland this month. Not an easy decision, though. He was tossing up whether to wear it again: “I don’t want to look like the cheap guy, you know. I’ve got a reputation to uphold now.”
He would like me to portray him as a “blowhard”. Good try. He says he has always been the “goody-two-shoes” in a family of five boys. He adds, mock morosely, “I am, you know, Mr Nice Guy. Everybody hates me.”
That outfit notwithstanding, he is not a fabulously flamboyant character. Hmm. There is the title-page picture on his website. He is bare-chested, standing in the sea and holding aloft a goldfish in a plastic bag. It is a mad and decidedly weird portrait. It was taken for a calendar in which directors and producers were asked to pose with their pet. He didn’t have a pet, so he went and bought that poor goldfish. It is a parody tribute to American actor Jason Momoa, who played Aquaman.
He is thoughtful, clever and funny. He laughs a lot; there’s a lot of joy in him. There is a lot of joy in his film. There is a lot of grief, too. Sounds like life, eh?
The film is really a story about family and its myriad meanings, and the ways of making a family. The hero of the story, Mareta, makes a choir, which is a metaphor for making a family – and losing family. It gives nothing away to say that at the film’s core is an examination of Mareta’s great loss: the death of her daughter, a talented young singer, in the Christchurch earthquake of 2011.
Mareta is the mother at the centre of the film. She is played with dignity and humour by Anapela Polataivao. She is formidable and forthright, loveable and a bit scary. Magasiva grew up around Samoan women like her.
“It’s a very fine line with our strong female leaders, like, there’s a really strong sense of guidance there that you don’t want to mess with. But married along with it is absolute love and care. So you felt supported, you felt guided, you felt loved – but you didn’t want to get out of line, either.”
There is a very funny scene in Tinā where Mareta brandishes a jandal and mock-threatens to apply it to the backsides of the kids who are playing up a bit. “With love, of course.” That is autobiographical. When Magasiva was growing up, “Oh, yeah, the jandal was always there. I mean the thing about the jandal, in our family we find it funny. Because we’re a group of five boys all growing up and at some stage the jandal just doesn’t work. It just becomes a comedy moment.”
The film is sad and funny, tender and joyous. But it’s his film, obviously, so let him describe it. “I think it wants to be a rollercoaster of the emotions that we go through in life, naturally. So, yes, there is grief in it, and alongside that is a lot of laughter, and we want people to go out of the theatres with a strong sense of hope. Though in my mind, as well, there’s nothing wrong with grief.”
Magasiva wrote the screenplay “when I was going through grief. But it really made me realise that it’s nothing to be scared of. And that perhaps we branded it the wrong way. To go through grief can actually be seen as a positive.”
I said it’s an old-fashioned film, and I didn’t mean this in a rude way: “Ha, I’ll be the judge of that!” I meant it as a compliment. He’ll take it as one.
“I love the way that you’ve put it. Actually, it is an old-fashioned film, because a lot of people have said ‘mainstream’, and I take offence to that. It’s modelled off so many films that I grew up watching. And that structure, that story, I have always enjoyed: a fish-out-of-water story, a teacher-student story. I have always really enjoyed those movies, so I just wanted to do that again. And there are people who’ve said, you know, we’ve seen this before. And I would argue we’ve seen all movies before. That doesn’t mean it’s not offering something a little bit different for you to be able to enjoy, and I think we’ve done that in this movie.”
Mareta, I think, although this is never explicit, loses her faith. Jesus has deserted her; she deserts Jesus. Magasiva grew up Catholic. “And much like all Samoan families, we went to Mass every Sunday.” He still believes in the Christian god, but, “I’ve sort of got my own approach to God now. Because I do see ways that religion has gone off the path. And so I choose to have my faith more internally than externally. But every night I will pray. It will be by myself. I won’t tell anybody about it when I’m doing it.” He no longer goes to mass. He believes in faith – faith in humanity.
Mareta takes Sophie – who, like her daughter, is a talented singer but is also a damaged, scarred and scared girl – under the maternal wing she thought she had lost, like her faith. Her friend Sio, who she helped through a difficult childhood and now works at Winz, gets Mareta an interview for a relief-teaching job at a posh private school. She’d lost her job as a teacher and maker of magical choirs after the earthquake destroyed her decile 1 school. To keep her benefit, she has to go through the motions and is interviewed by a snooty, and white, school board. A pompous git tells her what they’re really looking for is people like them. She gives them a Mareta look – and believe me, the Mareta look is not one anyone would want to experience – and says, “Like wankers?” She gets the job, which is where she meets Sophie and makes her choir. So, boo to the wankers.
Life in Samoa
In the little Samoan village where Magasiva’s parents now live after moving back there from New Zealand, is a pink house known in the family as the house the twins built. In 1980, a new hospital opened and it was announced that the first set of twins born there would win a prize. Pua and Tanu, the last of the five Magasiva boys, arrived and won the prize: the materials to build a new house.
Pua committed suicide in 2019, aged 38. Tinā is dedicated to him. There is a storyline involving Sio, who had a rough childhood and would arrive at Mareta’s house in his pyjamas. She would make him a Milo and he would tuck up for the night with her daughter. She took care of him. Now, after she has a breakdown following the loss of her daughter and her beloved school in the quake, he looks after her. Then he suffers his own breakdown.
I had asked Magasiva if he had any idea of how troubled his brother was, and he said, “The answer is, and I think I’m trying to reflect that in the mood quite often, that we won’t know a lot. I’m trying to say that Sio looks like a lovely guy. He’s altogether likeable. He’s funny. He’s got everything together. He helps other people in his own life and in his professional life but he’s hiding his own difficulties. I think that’s something we went through ourselves.”
How difficult was it to write the Sio storyline? “It wasn’t difficult at all. I don’t see his role in this movie as a difficult thing. I see it as empowering thing.”
The Magasiva aiga – mum Salafa, dad Taufaiula, the five boys and their adopted sister, moved from Samoa to Wellington in 1982. In Samoa, they’d made their living growing food on plantations. They lived a very simple life, he says. Before the house the twins built, they lived in a little house, which his eldest brother, actor Robbie, described as “a simple shack”. That, he says, laughing, is putting it nicely.
Magasiva was 5 when he arrived here, so escaped much of the inevitable culture shock. “I’m also just so proud of any parent who sacrifices a lot to start up life in a new country, an alien environment to them, making their way there and providing a life so the kids can have essentially what we all have right now. So, it’s certainly not like, you know, we don’t have arguments or our differences like every family does, but I do really admire Mum and Dad and the sacrifices they made.”
Family affair
He lives in Leigh, north of Auckland, with his partner Dana Felbab, on 6.5ha mostly in native bush. “We like to say it’s the poor part of Matakana.” Surely, he’s rich (we both know that to be a joke). “I’m a film-maker!”
Taika Waititi’s a film-maker and he’s rich. “I reckon. Far out, right?”
This leads him to improvise a fantasy riff on how he could move into one of Waititi’s houses which, he says, are so big he could take over a whole wing that Waititi doesn’t even know exists. He would then run into him in, say, a hallway, and Waititi would say, “When did you get here?” To which he would reply, “Two years ago.”
He’s funny as. He must get it from his mum, who, he says, is hilarious. His dad is well known for his elegant oratory. “When I think about a Samoan, I realise that there’s a performer in all Samoans, there’s a character in all Samoans. I think somewhere in the Pacific DNA, there is a creativity, a performance element to it, a storytelling element to it.
Now that we’re surrounded with these different mediums of telling stories, it’s not a surprise that a lot of us have found our way telling stories in one way, shape or form.
Robbie encouraged Miki and Pua into the world of acting and film after getting involved in Theatre Sports in Wellington. Magasiva worked for many years making commercials and directed his first short film in 2005, Rites of Courage. He later co-founded The Brown Factory, which champions Pasifika stories, and his work on miniseries The Panthers won him recognition at the 2022 New Zealand Television Awards.
He has what you might call an interesting CV. For all of his insistence that he is incapable of getting up to mischief, he once made, out of prosthetic rubber and with relish, a tapir’s bum. With poo coming out of it. That didn’t, for some unknown reason, make the final cut.
There is that picture with the goldfish. For a goody-two-shoes, he really is terrifically good fun.
Tinā is in cinemas from February 27.