Veisinia Moalapau’u became interested in filmmaking while playing an urban cowgirl in a music video for Sāmoan country singer Aaron Pulemagafa AKA TheWesternGuide. (Photo supplied)
Veisinia Moalapau‘u, 26, is hoping to follow in the footsteps of Pacific filmmakers like Miki Magasiva and Vea Mafile‘o.
With her debut short film scoring an audience choice award at an American film festival in April, Veisinia talked to Atakohu Middleton about what it means to follow her dream.
You have to admire young people who have the confidence to rock up to a stranger and say: “Hey! Listen to my story.” Well, that’s not quite what Veisinia Moalapau‘u said when she emailed E-Tangata, but it had the same effect.
In a polite email, the 26-year-old said that her debut short film, completed for film school last year, won the audience choice award at the Neumann Inspires Film Festival, held at Neumann University in Philadelphia, in the US.
Firstborn, she wrote, was “a short Tongan film shot entirely in my home in South Auckland, based on a true story about a wedding, a birth and a death happening almost all at once.”
That true story was hers.
That got my attention. A few questions later, I found out that before starting film school in 2025, Veisinia didn’t know anything about making films. Law was her thing. She was a full-time student in her fourth year of a five-year degree in law and a BA majoring in Pacific Studies, working part-time in customer service for Auckland Transport, raising two kids with husband Kardia Ah Kiau, also 26, and planning a career in the justice system.
Then the fortunate accident that is serendipity dropped in her lap.
Serendipity, in this case, has a name — Veisinia’s mate, Esther Mauga, a Sāmoan filmmaker. The pair met at a Halloween party at K Rd’s Sunset Tattoo a few years back and bonded over their Halloween costumes.
In 2024, Esther was hired to shoot a music video for Sāmoan country singer TheWesternGuide, aka Aaron Pulemagafa, and asked Veisinia if she’d play the singer’s on-screen urban cowgirl. Veisinia had never acted but agreed to help her friend.
The video was for Pulemagafa’s song “Bottom of the Bed”. Veisinia looks completely at home in the video — and the camera loves her.
But more interesting to Veisinia was the creativity required well before the camera rolled — the work of developing a vision, writing the story, and creating the world of the cowboy and his muse.
“I was looking at what everyone else was doing behind the scenes and thinking that I really liked the look of it,” she says.
Veisinia and Aaron Pulemagafa AKA TheWesternGuide, pictured in the music video for Aaron’s country song “Bottom of the Bed”. The video, made by Esther Mauga, was a finalist for best Pacific music video in the 2025 Pacific Music Video Awards. (Photo supplied)
It wasn’t just a passing interest. By the end of that year, Veisinia had applied and been accepted into the South Seas Film School on Auckland’s North Shore, where her friend Esther had trained.
She’d signed up for an intensive, one-year diploma in film and TV production, specialising in drama scriptwriting and directing.
That would have been enough of a challenge for a mother of two preschoolers (Alex, now five, and Charis, three). But Veisinia wasn’t giving up her degree studies at Auckland University or her part-time job.
The year would be ridiculously crammed, but she felt compelled to do it.
“I had a talk about it with Kardia and told him that I really wanted to do it. I had a really good feeling about this.” Kardia, who works as a carer when he doesn’t have dancing gigs, backed Veisinia’s dream.
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A few days after that first email, I met Veisinia at her Māngere home, which she and Kardia and the kids share with Veisinia’s younger brother David, who’s an accountant.
I wanted to know how Veisinia got through the year.
She did a grimace-laugh. There were moments of complete exhaustion and self-doubt, and many lessons in balancing her dream with responsibility.
The kids were in full-time daycare. On the bus to film school, Veisinia crammed recorded university lectures. After film school, she did her Auckland Transport job and completed coursework for both sets of studies. She still had to show up at uni for tests and exams. Family and friends helped keep the whole show on the road.
“It was really tough, and it did take a lot of time away from my bubbas. My kids depend on me, and my oldest boy is autistic,” she says. “So there was a lot more at stake, and I needed to make sure that it worked. I think that’s what kept me going. I don’t know if that’s a healthy way of going about it, but that’s how I went about it.”
While technical filmmaking skills presented a very steep learning curve, storytelling came naturally, thanks to a childhood steeped in stories. Veisinia is the eldest of seven children. Her parents are David and Helen Fulivai, Lord and Lady Fulivai, both of whom were born in Aotearoa. Both sides of the family were gifted storytellers, and Veisinia, also born and raised here, loved hearing them talk.
Veisinia was encouraged by her mum to read and write from a young age. When she was nine, her father was elected to Tonga’s parliament, and the family relocated there. She spent her time writing stories and poems to help her make sense of the relocation. At school, Veisinia enjoyed the work of women poets such as Konai Helu Thaman, who is Tongan, and Jully Sipolo, a Solomon Islands women’s rights activist.
However, at film school, advocating for stories rooted in Pacific experiences was sometimes fraught. Of the 16 students in Veisinia’s directing class, just four were women, all Māori or Pacific.
“It was quite hard to get our stories and our voices through without being shut down.” Her biggest challenge was trusting herself and her vision. “There were lots of times where I had to fight for myself.”
Veisinia is interested in exploring family dynamics through film, and that was highlighted in a very personal way in her final film school project, Firstborn.
She describes it as a love letter to her nana. The 12-minute film is a fictionalisation of her experience in a single week in 2021, when she was pregnant with her eldest, planning her wedding to Kardia, and caring full-time for her maternal grandmother, Melenaite Makeleta Falemaka Moa, who was terminally ill.
When Makeleta said that she didn’t think she would live long enough to be at the wedding, it was brought forward. This was in September 2021, when Covid restrictions meant just 10 people could gather. The day after Alex was born, Makeleta died in Veisinia’s arms.
It was an emotional rollercoaster — and making the film was cathartic for Veisinia.
“Losing my grandmother was one of the saddest but also one of the most beautiful things I’ve experienced, and I struggled with those feelings for a bit because I hadn’t quite processed it,” she says. “Writing the script for the film helped me peel those feelings back a bit.”
Veisinia on the set of Firstborn. The 12-minute film was her final project for film school and was made with $6,000 raised through crowdfunding. (Photo supplied)
Veisinia’s short film Firstborn won the audience choice award at the Neuman Inspires film festival in Philadelphia. Veisinia’s grandmother is played by Milika Pusiaki. (Photo supplied)
Told with minimal dialogue, the storytelling relies on striking visuals, layered soundscapes, and an original score. The old-school Tongan love songs woven into the film are by Veisinia’s late aunt Tu’imala Kaho, who was known in her day as “the nightingale of Tonga” for her compositions.
As the credits roll, we see a video of the real Makeleta, sitting in bed wearing a nasal oxygen cannula, holding her new grandchild for the first time. It’s a gentle, contemplative film about love, loss, and new beginnings, and it made me cry.
Looking back, says Veisinia, “there are a lot of things I could have done better. It would have been that way, anyway, because it’s my first film. But I’m really glad that I did choose to do it. I wanted to do it for my family.”
Graduating from film school at the end of 2025. (Photo supplied)
Film school over, it was time for Veisinia to get her name out there. Filmmakers launch their stories at festivals to generate critical buzz. Veisinia was shocked to hear that Firstborn was the audience favourite at the Neumann Inspires Film Festival.
Since then, Firstborn has been selected for two other film festivals, both in June: the online Swedish International Film Festival and the Māsima Film Festival in Salt Lake City, an annual in-person affair. Veisinia would’ve liked to attend, but she has no desire to visit the US in its current state. “It’s so sad what’s happening over there, and I don’t want to risk it.”
She continues to submit Firstborn to film festivals here and overseas, so it’s not yet available publicly, but you can see photos on her website, as well as her other short films.
Life is a little less frantic these days. Veisinia works full-time for Auckland Transport and is in her last semester of university. She expects to graduate with a conjoint Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws in September.
Veisinia pictured on a visit to an Auckland law firm in 2025. (Photo supplied)
She’s eyeing up becoming an entertainment lawyer to get herself closer to the film industry. But the dream is to be a full-time filmmaker. She’s developing a feature-film script called Turtle, about a struggling Tongan artist who rises to the top of her field but discovers something she needs to confront.
Meanwhile, the work of making her dream a reality continues. Film industry friends have advised her “to just get out there and not be afraid to be rejected”. So here she is.
Kia kaha, e hine!
Dr Atakohu Middleton (Waikato, Pākehā) isE-Tangata’sarts editor. She is a journalist whose lengthy career has included outlets as diverse asRadio Waatea*, theGuardian(UK),*theNew Zealand Listener, theSunday Star-Times, and theNew Zealand Herald. She lives in Tāmaki Makaurau. Her bookKia Hiwa Rā!, on Māori journalism in Aotearoa, was published in 2024.
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