Bringing Sāmoan Tales to the Table
One of five Western Sydney creatives selected for In the Room, Sāmoan writer and filmmaker Gabriel Faatau’uu-Satiu brings cultural nuance and Pasifika storytelling to a special film collaboration between Co-Curious and Powerhouse.
‘Writing can be a very lonely thing. But because my stories come from the lived experiences of my community, they are with me in every step of my writing process. Therefore, I am never truly alone when I write.’
In the 2021 pilot for a planned web series called Breaking Bread, three generations of a Sāmoan/Australian family gather at the table, passing around stories and a plate of povi masima, or salted beef. As they sample the Sāmoan delicacy, hesitantly at first and then with gusto, the tales grow wilder and darker: how povi masima was used to brush teeth, wash dishes and clean undies; how its pale pink colour resembles human flesh; how in the early days of colonisation, it was mistakenly fed to the missionaries to prevent cannibalism and the disappearance of Sāmoans. ‘Our people were mysteriously vanishing,’ says Sina, sharing her grandmother’s story in Breaking Bread. ‘Sāmoa had ceased to exist.’ The episode ends with Sina exacting her own macabre revenge on the colonisers, while also expressing a traditional form of Sāmoan storytelling, fāgogo, for future generations.
‘A fāgogo is dictated by the storyteller and I’ve always known them to be quite dark,’ says Gabriel Faatau’uu-Satiu, the Western Sydney-based Sāmoan creative from Aotearoa/New Zealand who wrote, directed and produced the Breaking Bread pilot that premiered at the Pasifika Film Festival in late 2020. ‘It is very performative and over the years commonly includes pese (song) and (dance) ... Pacific storytelling doesn’t fall into that typical three-act structure. Our stories are a bit more circular.’
