Burning of the Gods

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An airplane lands. A massive cruise boat anchors off the reef, disgorging tourists for tropical island vacations. This postcard paradise depends on petroleum imports to fuel its cars, motorbikes, boats, hotels, pumps and machinery. Yet if the tourists stopped coming, what then? The film opens with the prophetic words of Niuean artist John Pule and continues as a visual tone poem, without dialogue or narration, moving forward into the past to ask questions about the future. A young man travels back in time, from luxury resorts and lagoon tours through pandemic and population exodus, to early Christianity when missionaries incinerated his island's atua and marae. Finally he reconnects with his tipuna who settled the island a thousand years ago. The film's structure adopts Polynesian perceptions of non-linear time, where past, present and future intertwine. The past coexists with our present and future. Our ancestors are ever-present, alongside and within us.