Marks of Mana

Lisa Taouma is a film maker and TV website producer of great skill.

//www.nzonscreen.com/person/lisa-taouma

Her recent film release, Marks of Mana, screened in the Doc Edge film festival, documents the involvement of women in Tatau, the art of tatooing, throughout the Pacific.  This is a beautiful film, showing women both giving and receiving tatau, and explaining the meaning of tatau. 

Lisa has had her own malu (knee to thigh tatoo) done in Samoa, and says, in a Sunday Star Times Magazine interview:

…They’re not a light undertaking. You can’t get one unless you are going to live up to it. ..It reminds me, all the time, you have to live your life with mana….You have the weightof your grandmother’s marks on you, and her grandmother’s, and her grandmother’s..you are living with history..

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The film premier was introduced by a very skilled Samoan women’s dance group, laying down a huge tapa mat, and they concluded  the film with another dance and the skilled folding of the mat.  The largely  Pasifika audience loved both the dance group and the film. We did too, of course. 

You can access Marks of Mana in July from Lisa’s TV website, thecoconet.tv