When I took a break from blogging several months ago, I left the story of our third production trip to Fiji half-finished. I will rectify this in the next several blogs over the coming weeks.
When we left off, we had just interviewed several academics at the University of the South Pacific about Fijian history, especially in regards to the colonial era. (As you who have been following the project know, Alexi’s great-great grandfather G.H. Lee came to Fiji in the 19th century and her mother Jean Bish grew up in colonial Suva. The central focus of the film is the complicated legacy of colonialism in Fiji.)
As I noted in an earlier blog, the Grand Pacific Hotel, the crown jewel of colonial-era Suva, has been gloriously restored after years of abandonment and decay as well as military occupation after the 2006 coup (see the trailer), and we desperately wanted to film there.
Our goal was twofold. One, we wanted to film Jean returning to the hotel and capture her response to being “transported” back to the location of some of her warmest childhood memories. In addition, we wanted to shoot reenactment footage in black and white Super 8 film, in order to transport the audience themselves to that time and place.
While in Suva, we were lucky enough to meet Steve Reid from Webmedia, who did the website for the Grand Pacific. Steve kindly put me in contact with Una Namudu, the Sales and Marketing Manager of the hotel, and she was able to get us permission to spend a day shooting in the hotel and also promised us free access to a hotel suite during the course of the shoot. We were very appreciative and thankful to Ms. Namudu and to Eugen Diethelm, the General Manager of the hotel.
When we arrived on the day of the shoot, we were pleasantly surprised to find that our suite for the day was in fact the Queen Elizabeth Suite, the largest and best situated of all their luxury rooms. In fact, it is called the Queen Elizabeth Suite because it is where Her Highness stayed during her Royal Visit to Fiji in 1953. Here is a photo of Liz standing on the balcony right outside the suite.
The QE Suite was perfect for hosting Jean’s return to the Grand Pacific Hotel. As those of you who have had the pleasure of meeting her know, despite her leftist politics and anti-monarchist views, Jean is quite regal in her own way, with a refined air about her that makes you feel that you should be grateful to be having an audience with her in her court!
We shot footage of Jean walking into the large formal entrance of the hotel and into its vast and beautifully restored lobby. She gazed in wonder as to how much it matched the Grand Pacific Hotel of her distant memories of times past. Later, we filmed her having tea on the balcony, and she told memories of coming to the hotel with her family as a child for weekend teas and being served by Sikh waiters in all-white uniforms and turbans. Then, as a teenager during World War Two, Jean would come to the Grand Pacific for dances with the American sailors whose officer’s club was located in the hotel. Jean, of course, ended up marrying one of those Americans and would later come to America on a bride ship.
After shooting Jean at the hotel, we shot the reenactment footage. Our friend Kerry Barker dressed up in some lovely vintage clothes that we picked up in the Suva Flea Market and we shot her playing the part of a young Jean haunting the hotel as a teenager in the 1940’s. Here is a photo of our cinematographer Smith shooting Kerry as Jean:
The Grand Pacific Hotel is both a relic of the past and a symbol of renewal. It can be seen nostalgically as a remnant of British civility, and it can be seen problematically as a romanticization of a less egalitarian time. For many, the hotel’s restoration is a hopeful sign that Fiji’s long period of troubles may be behind her.
For us, it was a very good day of shooting! And, afterwards it was especially nice to celebrate Alexi’s birthday on the veranda of the GPH and enjoy the beautiful sunset over a celebratory glass of bubbly!