Kneller Lecture
"Indigenous Pacific Islanders in Film"
by Dr. Vilsoni Hereniko
Tuesday, March 14, 2:30 pm. Hawaii Convention Center, Room 313 A/B/C

Film Screening: The Land Has Eyes, followed by afterfilm discussion with Hereniko and Jeannette Paulson-Hereniko, co-producer.
Tuesday, March 14, 7:30 pm. Room 313 A/B/C

A scholar-artist from the tiny island culture of Rotuma (in the Fiji group) presents the Annual George Kneller Distinguished Lecture at the 50th Anniversary Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society, on March 14, 2006 at the Hawaii Convention Center, Honolulu Hawaii. Dr. Vilsoni Hereniko is one of Oceania's best-known playwrights and filmmakers living and working in the Pacific region today.

Hereniko speaks on "Indigenous Pacific Islanders in Contemporary Film," emphasizing the educational importance of native peoples to tell their stories in their own ways to the larger globalized world. As an artist and educator, he has created cultural products that present a voice rarely heard in the mass media of today.

He has written children's books, published more than a dozen plays; many of his plays (such as Last Virgin in Paradise and Sera's Choice) have been produced and studied in schools in the Pacific region as well as in the United States and England.

In the last seven years, Hereniko has taken up filmmaking as a means of reaching an international audience as well as other fellow Rotumans. Hereniko is also the first indigenous person from Fiji to make a feature film, having been its best-known playwright for more than twenty years. Titled The Land Has Eyes, his feature film is set on Rotuma and is about a young girl who seeks freedom and justice for her family through education.

Film Screening: The Land Has Eyes
Afterfilm discussion by Vilsoni Hereniko and Jeannette Paulson-Hereniko

Conference participants will also be treated to a screening of Hereniko's feature film The Land has Eyes, followed by a discussion with Hereniko and his co-producer, his wife, Jeannette Paulson-Hereniko.

For more information on the film visit:
http://www.thelandhaseyes.com

The film premiered at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in 1994 and subsequently was invited to screen at film festivals all over the world, including the Rotterdam Film Festival, Moscow International Film Festival, Montreal International Film Festival, and Shanghai International Film Festival. In 2005 the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (in New York as well as Washingto D.C.) and the New York Museum of Modern Art invited Eyes to screen at their venues. The film has won several awards, including best dramatic feature at the 2004 Toronto ImagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival.

The youngest of eleven children, Hereniko earned a Masters degree in education from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England and a Ph.D. in literature and language from the University of the South Pacific (USP) in Fiji. Hereniko taught at the USP for about ten years before being invited to join the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawaii, 1991. In 1997 he received the Hawai`i Elliot Cades Award for his "significant body of work of exceptional quality," and in 2000 he received a presidential citation for meritorious teaching from University of Hawaii.

When Hereniko is not writing plays or books, directing or teaching, he authors scholarly articles, and also edits The Contemporary Pacific, the leading journal for the academic study of the Pacific.

The George Kneller lecture is funded by a generous endowment to the Comparative and International Education Society. The gift was at the bequest of the late Dr. Kneller, who was a philosopher of education at University of California at Los Angeles, who wrote on many subjects, including in the field of Comparative Education.