Tanna

After seven months living on the titular island, Australian documentarists Bentley Dean and Martin Butler make an accomplished switch to drama with this Oscar-nominated, fact-based feature - the first to have been shot entirely in Vanuatu. It goes without saying that the South Pacific setting is stunning. But this is more than an ethnographical travelogue as Dean and Butler guide their excellent amateur ensemble through a tale of star-crossed love that is as poignant as the insights are acute into vanishing tradition and the changing status of women. At the core of the action is a feud on the volcanic island of Tanna between the Yakel and Imedin tribes and the refusal of a free-spirited woman (Marie Wawa) to abandon the chief's handsome grandson (Mungau Dain) in order to fulfil an arranged marriage, brokered as part of a truce. However, sequences of daily life, desperate flight and poetic symbolism mingle to make this as culturally respectful and compelling as Rolf De Heer's Ten Canoes (2006), with which it shares much more than just editor Tania Nehme.