Vilsoni Hereniko


Vilsoni Hereniko is a Rotuman playwright, screenwriter, film director, academic, author, actor, poet, and master weaver. He is best known as the writer-director of The Land Has Eyes, the first feature film shot on Rotuma, and for a long academic career as a scholar of Pacific literature, theatre and film. Hereniko has served as director of Pacific studies centres, edited the academic journal The Contemporary Pacific, lectured widely, and in recent years has produced short films, documentaries, and scholarly essays that foreground Indigenous aesthetics and cultural practice.
He is a professor at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Hawaiʻi.

Biography

Vilsoni Hereniko was born in Mea village, Hapmak, Itu'ti'u District, Rotuma, Fiji, on 13 October 1954 and is the youngest of eleven children. He won a scholarship to Queen Victoria School in Fiji and later studied at the University of the South Pacific. Hereniko received a Master of Education from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and a Ph.D. in literature and language from the University of the South Pacific. His early experience of Rotuman oral storytelling strongly influenced his later creative and scholarly work.

Career

Literary and theatre work

Hereniko began publishing plays in the mid-1970s. His stage works—many of which have been produced throughout the Pacific and are taught in schools—include Don't Cry, Mama, A Child for Iva, Sera's Choice, The Monster, Last Virgin in Paradise, Sina & Tinilau, Fine Dancing, Love 3 Times and Moana: The Rising of the Sea.
His books include Woven Gods: Female Clowns and Power in Rotuma and the edited volume Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics'', and Identity in the New Pacific''. In 1997 Hereniko received the Elliot Cades Writing Award for his body of creative work.

Film

Hereniko wrote and directed the feature film The Land Has Eyes, filmed on Rotuma and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004; the film also screened at numerous international festivals and was Fiji’s official submission for the Academy Awards. It received the "Best Overall Entry" award at the 2005 Wairoa Maori Film Festival, and the "Best Dramatic Feature" award at the 2004 ImagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival.
The film tells the story of Viki, a young Rotuman woman shamed as the daughter of a man wrongly accused of theft who finds inspiration in the legend of a “Warrior Woman” from Rotuman oral tradition.
Hereniko’s earlier film work includes short films and documentaries such as The Han Maneak Su in a Rotuman Wedding and Just Dancing. In recent years he has directed an animated short Sina Ma Tinirau and a narrative Woven, a story about an indigenous basket weaver who struggles to complete a coconut leaf basket in a city of high rises.
Hereniko has served on the jury and selection committee of the Hawai‘i International Film Festival. The Land Has Eyes, set in his native Rotuma, was his first feature film, in 2004. It was presented at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004, and was Rotuma's official submission to the 2006 Academy Awards.

Filmography