Waves, the film about Hutt Valley High School Chinese international students, screens on TV in China over Chinese New Year. The documentary, directed Li Tao a former teacher of HVHS, will be shown on the major documentary channel in Shanghai and Hong Kong.
Voted one of the top ten movies in the 2006 New Zealand Film Festival, the documentary, about four Chinese students studying at Hutt Valley High School, is a touching portrayal of their struggles and eventual triumphs. Director, Li Tao, renders their experience with great insight and tenderness, for the edification of those they’ve left behind in one country, and the enlightenment of those who don’t quite know what to make of them in another. Li, formerly an international student at Victoria University herself, was their teacher, and the intimacy she achieves suggests that she and her camera became surrogate parent to her subjects. The delicacy of her attention to their woes and joys makes it clear how faithful to that role she remains.
Waves sold out in its Festival screenings all over the country. Li Tao believes that the film carries an important message back to her homeland, that of the care and attention that the students receive in their education here and the enormous range of opportunities that are offered to international students in Wellington and all over New Zealand.
Almost completely filmed in Hutt Valley High School and featuring many of our students, Waves follows a year in the lives of four Chinese international students as  they adapt to life in New Zealand. In chapter one, we follow Ken as he experiences his first New Zealand Fathers Day. It shows how close international students can become to their host family and the positive impact that a foreign student can bring in a New Zealand home. In chapter two, we watch Rose mingle with Kiwis and see the close friendships that can develop between international students and local students. Chapter three tells a more universal story of a rite-of-passage that is taken for granted by Kiwi students but is often a huge step for an international student – preparing for the school ball. Lin struggles to deal with the conflict between her need to experience new things and the lack of understanding from home. Finally, we are with Jane whose story shows how a student can deal with the homesickness that often comes with living far away from loved ones.
It is Li Tao’s hope that by showing the positive experiences that international students have at Hutt Valley High School it will demonstrate to the world the creative, vibrant and colourful nature of New Zealand school culture. |
