Tanna

Tanna takes us to a tiny little island of Vanuatu, where different ways of life are caught up in conflict: Some residents have converted to the Christian religion, while others remain faithful to ancestral traditions. As her adulthood initiation ceremony is closing in, a young girl decides to run off with the grandson of a neighboring tribe’s chief. Aware that endogamy is frowned upon by tradition, as inter-tribal marriages help to ensure peace, the two young lovers are trying to conceal their relationship from everyone. Based on true events that took place in the 1980s, and entirely shot in the Nauvhal language, Tanna was a Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar nominee.

Screening Schedule

No physical screenings scheduled.

Direction: Bentley Dean, Martin Butler

Script: Bentley Dean, Martin Butler, and John Collee, in collaboration with the people of Yakel

Cinematography: Bentley Dean

Editing: Tania Michel Nehme

Sound: Emma Bortignon

Music: Antony Partos

Actors: Mungau Dain, Marie Wawa, Marceline Rofit, Chief Charlie Kahla, Albi Nangia, Lingai Kowia, Dadwa Mungau, Linette Yowayin, Kapan Cook, Chief Mungau Yokay, Chief Mikum Tainakou

Production: Contact Films

Producers: Martin Butler, Bentley Dean, Carolyn Johnson

Format: DCP

Color: Color

Production Country: Australia, Vanuatu

Production Year: 2015

Duration: 104΄

Awards/Distinctions: Academy Award Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film 2017, Fedeora Award for Best Cinematography (International Film Critics' Week), International Critics' Week Award – Venice IFF 2015, Special Jury Prize – London FF 2015, Best Original Music Score – Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts 2016

Bentley Dean

Bentley Dean was a participant in ABC’s inaugural Race Around the World series in 1997. After working as a freelance director and cinematographer, he started working for SBS’s international current affairs program Dateline in 2001. Bentley went on to make a number of award-winning powerful social documentaries including Anatomy of a Coup, The President versus David Hicks, The Siege, and A Well-Founded Fear. In 2009, he teamed up with Martin Butler to make Contact – a film about the last desert peoples’ first contact with modern Australia. They made the four-part documentary series First Footprints about Australia’s 50,000-year Aboriginal history in 2013.

Filmography

2002 Anatomy of a Coup (doc)
2007 The Siege (doc, co-direction)
2009 Contact (doc, co-direction)
2015 Tanna (co-direction)
2021 Facing Monsters (doc)

Martin Butler

Martin Butler studied Politics and Economics at Oxford University. In 1981 he migrated to Australia and spent the next 25 years producing award-winning documentary reports on ABC’s Four Corners and Foreign Correspondent, and SBS’s Dateline. In 2009, he teamed up with Bentley Dean to make Contact, a film about the last first contact in the Western Desert of Australia. They made the four-part documentary series First Footprints about Australia’s 50,000-year Aboriginal history in 2013.