Keyword Oceania

Robert J. Flaherty's South Seas follow-up to Nanook of the North is a Gauguin idyll moved by "pride of beauty... pride of strength."

Air force Lieutenant Harris starts for a flight to Boa Boa, on board Reverend Mitchell with a box containing a part of a top-secret extraterrestrial key. They get lost in a supernatural storm and find themselves after an emergency landing in kind of a Bermuda triangle, 5,000 miles off their course. Home again, no one believes Harris' story, and his crew suspiciously denies it too. Harris is thrown in jail, but manages to escape. Together with Mitchell's daughter he seeks the lost part of the key and its secret.

For the 'Are'are people of the Solomon Islands, the most valued music is that of the four types of panpipe ensembles. With the exception of slit drums, all musical instruments are made of bamboo; therefore the general word for instruments and the music performed with them is "bamboo" ('au). This film shows the making of panpipes, from the cutting the bamboo in the forest to the making of the final bindings. The most important part of the work consists in shaping each tube to its necessary length. Most 'Are'are panpipe makers measure the length of old instruments before they shape new tubes. Master musician 'Irisipau, surprisingly, takes the measure using his body, and adjusts the final tuning by ear. For the first time we can see here how the instruments and their artificial equiheptatonic scale-seven equidistant degrees in an octave-are practically tuned.

A 1997 documentary by Micronesian scholar, Vicente M. Diaz, that follows a new generation of traditional outrigger canoe builders and navigators from Polowat, Central Carolines, Federated States of Micronesia, and Guam in their respective efforts to continue and resuscitate an ancient tradition of outrigger canoe carving and sailing in the late twentieth century. Like the motif of water that flows through the documentary and blurs lines between surface and depth, and between water, land and air, an indefatigable tradition and aesthetic of seafaring is shown to also challenge pat and problematic distinctions between past and present, tradition and modernity, indigenous and Christian religiosity and spirituality, that prevail in conventional understandings of Micronesian culture and history.

New Zealand hip-hop artist Che Fu and his father Tigi Ness travel to their island homeland Niue for the first time to unravel the shared histories. There they also wow the locals with a performance at the Niue Arts and Cultural Festival.

A quiet island, lost in the pacific ocean. Nothing worth of interest, until the day a stroke of luck, phosphate, provided by the island's coral core, led the country to incredible heights: in 1975, it became the second richest country per inhabitant in the world after Saudi Arabia... Only to plunge into ruins a few years later.

A black-and-white short film about Heiva, a Tahitian folklore festivity.

The Man from Snowy River is an Australian television series based on Banjo Paterson's poem "The Man from Snowy River". Released in Australia as Banjo Paterson's The Man from Snowy River, the series was subsequently released in both the United States and the United Kingdom as Snowy River: The McGregor Saga. The television series has no relationship to the 1982 film The Man from Snowy River or the 1988 sequel The Man from Snowy River II. Instead, the series follows the adventures of Matt McGregor, a successful squatter, and his family. Matt is the hero immortalized in Banjo Paterson's poem "The Man from Snowy River", and the series is set 25 years after his famous ride.