Kuo Hina E Hiapo: The Mulberry is White and Ready for Harvest
Kuo Hina E Hiapo: The Mulberry is White and Ready for Harvest
| 01 January 2001 (USA)
Kuo Hina E Hiapo: The Mulberry is White and Ready for Harvest Trailers

Tapa cloth, or ngatu as it is called in Tonga, is cloth made from the bark of the mulberry tree. The inner bark is beaten into fine sheets and painted using traditional designs. After centuries of use, ngatu has literally become the fabric of Tongan society. In Tonga and throughout much of Polynesia, bark cloth has deep symbolic and ceremonial use. At birth, babies are swaddled in it. At marriage, newlyweds line their wedding bed, and at death, the departed are buried wrapped in it. This documentary investigates the highly collaborative process of making ngatu and the organizations of women who carry on with the tradition. While the process continues to be passed on from generation to generation, there are signs of change as a cash economy begins to infiltrate Tongan life. Young people show less interest in such labor intensive endeavor in the face of the older generation's belief that this tradition will never die.

Reviews
Huievest

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

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Myron Clemons

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

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Roy Hart

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

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Lidia Draper

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

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