Shuchi Kothari

Whiria te Tāngata: Weaving the people together in the writing and production of Kāinga (Aotearoa New Zealand, 2022).

University of Auckland, New Zealand

Kāinga (Home in Māori) (2022) is the third feature film in Brown Sugar Apple Grunt’s critically acclaimed portmanteau trilogy of indigenous and immigrant women’s stories in Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific after Waru (2016) and Vai, (2018). Each anthology film consists of eight one-shot 10-minute stories about women told by women, united around a single predetermined theme. For Kāinga it is home. Set in the same house from the 1970s to the present, this multilingual film unfolds the complexities of Asians making their home in bi-cultural Aotearoa New Zealand in te reo Maori, Mandarin, Japanese, Tagalog, Korean, Marathi, Farsi and English.

This paper sifts through dialogues and conversations about authorship, ownership, and authenticity in the development of the film with three producers (Indian, Papua New Guinean-Scottish, Māori-Chinese) and 11 writers and directors from different New Zealand Asian backgrounds. As a producer focusing on story, I worked with our team over a five-day residential writing retreat to complete the first draft of the screenplay(s). We debated the authenticity of one’s right to write and direct a particular story, and voice particular experiences. We grappled with how to achieve the authenticity of languages on screen when some of our writers were not always fluent in their ‘mother tongue’. We negotiated the balance of professional and non-professional Asian actors needed to achieve authentic representation. We had difficult conversations about authorship and ownership of each story and the ceding of creative control for the goal of a unified story made by a collective. Our process developed a model for intercultural collaborative filmmaking informed by the other productions in the trilogy, and advocacy for equitable and authentic pan-Asian representation on and off the screen.

Shuchi Kothari is a critically acclaimed screenwriter and producer (Kāinga, Firaaq, Apron Strings, Coffee & Allah, Rann, Shit One Carries). Her films have screened globally in film festivals including Venice, Cannes, Toronto and Telluride and on online platforms such as Mubi, Netflix and Amazon. Shuchi’s creative work often focuses on issues of inclusion, exclusion, cultural hegemony and personal resistance. Shuchi is the recipient of WIFT (New Zealand)’s “Outstanding Contribution to the Screen Industry” award for her sustained work as filmmaker, mentor, and screen industry advocate. She’s the co-founder of The Pan-Asian Screen Collective in Aotearoa New Zealand (www.pasc.co.nz). Shuchi publishes in the fields of Asian representation, Creative Research, and Health Communication. She heads the screen production programme at the University of Auckland where she teaches screenwriting and creative producing.