Moana with Sound

One of the great Flaherty’s masterpieces, the film that gave birth to the word “documentary,” chronicles the “faraway world” of Polynesia, offering today-even more so in its sound version-a reflection on anthropology and visual colonialism.

The events of the young “Moana of the South Seas,” the rituals of her community, are filmed by Flaherty as an expression of “life itself.” Fifty years after the filming she witnessed as a child, Monica Flaherty returns to Samoa for a titanic undertaking: to add voices and sounds to her father’s silent masterpiece. With an immense amount of post-synchronization work (ex-novo recordings of ambient sounds, reconstruction of the words of the protagonists and leads through lip-reading, recovery of forgotten traditional Samoan songs) that is not just “re-release,” the film becomes individual memory and an act of collective restitution.