Firstborn

Firstborn is a short Tongan drama about love, loss, and new beginnings. The film follows Alana, heavily pregnant and caring for her terminally ill grandmother, as she experiences a wedding, a birth, and a death within the same week. With your support, we are aiming to raise $2,000 to complete this project and share this deeply personal story with audiences who understand the beauty and pain of family, caretaking, and transition.

My name is Veisinia Moalapau’u Fulivai, a filmmaker and law student based in Auckland. My creative practice is rooted in Tongan storytelling and the ways film can honour memory, tradition, and intergenerational relationships. Firstborn is my most personal work to date, drawn from my lived experience of giving birth two days before my grandmother passed away.

I am supported by a talented crew from South Seas Film School, selected by the school, who bring expertise across directing, cinematography, production design, and sound. Together, we are committed to telling bold, authentic Pacific stories that resonate both locally and internationally.

We are raising $2,000 to support the completion of Firstborn. These funds will go directly toward:

• Equipment hire (camera, lighting, sound gear)
• Production costs (location hire, transport, catering)
• Post-production (editing, colour grading, sound design, original score)
• Festival submissions and distribution

Your contribution ensures that we can complete the film to the highest standard and share it widely.

Firstborn is an intimate, immersive film about the cycles of life and death. Shifting between the grandmother Ana’s fading perspective and the newborn’s first moments, the film explores how grief and joy exist side by side. Told with minimal dialogue, the film relies on striking visuals, layered soundscapes, and an original score inspired by Emile Mosseri’s Minari.

This project is deeply personal to me — it is how I honour my nana and share the bittersweet truth that endings and beginnings often overlap. At the same time, it speaks to universal experiences of love, caretaking, and loss, opening a space for audiences to reflect on their own relationships and family histories.

This story needs to be seen because it reflects the realities of love and loss in a way that is rarely shown on screen. While the story is grounded in a Tongan family experience, its themes are universal — caretaking, the transition of generations, and the coexistence of grief and joy.

By backing Firstborn, you are helping us create a film that honours Pacific voices and perspectives, while also resonating with anyone who has loved, lost, or cared for a loved one. This is a story for the Tongan community, the wider Pacific creative community, and for all audiences who believe in the power of film to connect us through shared human experience.