LOS ANGELES — The Pasifika Entertainment Advancement Komiti, or PEAK, kicked off its first in-person event to a full house in downtown Los Angeles last week with a panel discussion on the future of Pasifika storytelling.
PEAK is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to “redefine and expand Pasifika entertainment” and inspire Pacific Islander creatives to “thrive, evolve and drive innovative storytelling that honors the richness and diversity across Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia.”
“We want to be able to tell all kinds of stories, all kinds of ways, all sorts of genres,” filmmaker Kerry Warkia told a crowd of people at the May 4 event when asked what Pasifika storytelling meant to her. “We want the whole spectrum.”
Warkia, who is Papua New Guinean, was joined by the organization’s Samoan co-founder and writer Dana Ledoux Miller, Tongan actor Uli Latukefu and Guamanian writer Freddie Gutierrez. The conversation was moderated by Samoan PEAK co-founder Kristian Fanene Schmidt.
“We want to be able to walk into all sorts of rooms, partner with whoever we want to partner with and tell our stories. And yes, we want those stories to have integrity, and we want them to be authentic to us,” Warkia continued. “I think it’s about us not feeling like we have been locked out of storytelling, not feeling like we have ridiculous standards that are set by people who don’t even come from our communities. I think that’s what it is to me, to be able to kind of embrace the spectrum of storytelling of our humanity and to be able to dive into that in whatever way we want to tell that.”
Latukefu, who portrays college-aged Dwayne Johnson on the NBC series “Young Rock,” chimed in to share his own perspective: “It feels like the imagination — our imagination as specific people — is limited at the moment. And what I would like to see is a level of excellence and a standard that people gravitate to toward us, just as they do with the Black…
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