CIRCUIT is delighted to note that Pati Tyrell’s 2022 film Tulouna le Lagi is one of eight short films from Aotearoa and the Pacific that have been selected for the Ngā Whanaunga Māori Pasifika Shorts programme at this year’s prestigious Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival (NZIFF).
The programme has been selected by curators Leo Koziol (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Rakaipaaka), Director of the Wairoa Māori Film Festival and CIRCUIT’s 2023 Matariki curator, and Craig Fasi (Niue), Director of the Pollywood Film Festival, and will screen during NZIFF in all festival locations.
Tulouna le Lagi was commissioned in 2022 as part of Legacies, CIRCUIT’s 7th annual programme of Artist Cinema Commissions, curated by Dr May Adadol Ingawanij (Thai/UK). The work is a visual interpretation of the alagaupu (proverbs) used within Samoan funeral chants and speeches.
Pati Tyrell is a Samoan interdisciplinary artist with a strong focus on performance. He uses lens-based media to create visual material centred around ideas of urban Pacific queer identity. He has shown work at Museum of Contemporary Arts Australia, Pingyao International Photography Festival, Centre Pompidou Paris and was a 2018 Walters Prize Nominee. Tyrell is co-founder of the queer Pasifika arts collective FAFSWAG, who in 2020 received an Arts Foundation Laureate, and in 2022 showed at documenta fifteen in Kassel, Germany.
