| Summary: | With 96% of the world's population speaking only 4% of the world's languages, what does it mean to speak your mother tongue in this age of language homogenization? Set in Taiwan and Hawai'i, territories where Austronesian languages are spoken, the experimental feature documentary TONGUES OF HEAVEN focuses on the questions, desires, and challenges of young indigenous peoples to learn the languages of their forebears -- languages that are endangered or facing extinction. Using digital video as the primary medium of expression, four young indigenous women from divergent backgrounds collaborate and exchange ideas to consider the impact of language on identity and culture. As a cross-boundary filmmaking practice, TONGUES OF HEAVEN attempts to destabilize national, ethnic, and regional formations through an experimental aesthetics of the personal that establishes new connections and alliances within and outside the field of documentary filmmaking. As a result, it participates in presenting the contemporary (post)colonial conditions of Hawai'i and Taiwan, exposing differences and similarities, and proposing affinities and potential solidarities. The production methodology of collaborative personal camerawork reflects, refracts, and complicates notions of "native", "authenticity", "belonging", and "identity" through its personal, avant-garde expression and techniques, and thus makes a modest contribution to approaches in autoethnographic audio-visual productions.
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