Women of the Moana on the screen: A talanoa with Kerry Warkia 

Sonja talanoas with film producer Kerry Warkia in Naarm in 2023 while she was a special guest for the Melbourne Women in Film Festival with her film Kainga that screened as the clsong night film at the festival.

Kerry Warkia (Papua New Guinean- Tolai Clan /Scottish) is a producer who has been at the forefront of
some of Aotearoa’s most innovative content for film,television and web.In 2016 Kerry produced, ground-breaking feature film WARU made up of eight vignettes and made in collaboration with nine wāhine (female) Māori film-makers.Passionate about telling Māori and Pacific stories, her second feature film Vai set in seven Pacific island countries and made in collaboration with 9 Pacific va'ine had its world premiere at the Berlinale Film Festival 2019.
Included in the Vai anthology were two Queer Pasifika stories from Niue and Aotearoa. Her third feature film an action-comedy called The Legend of Baron To'a directed by Kiel McNaughton.And now her fourth is the final of the trilogy begun by WARU and Vai and that is Kainga (2022) which represents the world of Pan-Asian women and their experiences as diaspora and community in Aotearoa.
Kerry’s production company,along with her partner Kiel McNaughton, is called Brown Sugar Apple Grunt,and as she says: “ is a dessert that we like to eat a lot of. But we also felt it kind of was us as well. Brown
celebrates our ethnicity. Sugar symbolises the fun we like to have. Apple is a reminder to be natural and
authentic. And Grunt is getting the work done.” With the collaborations Kerry has been involved in she
says:“In filmmaking, the essence is collaboration. For something to be really good, there needs to be different
perspectives, techniques and skills from lots of different people. That’s essential to get a film from the seed, right through to the screen.And collaboration is absolutely my jam. It’s a place where I love to be. When a whole team starts working in synergy,incredible things happen. As they did with Waru. And with Vai.“And I do think that women definitely have a different touch and perspective. The way we view the world is different and
so are our life experiences. And we bring those differences to our work when we’re making films.”