The story begins when Sarah Graham was holidaying in Fiji and came to meet a teenage Fijian boy, Varayame, confined to a wheel chair since a very young age. Having been denied proper medical treatment for a open wound in his lower back, he eventually lost the use of his legs and developed club feet. Sarah, a student studying documentary making at the South Pacific Film School, made the decision there and then she would do all she could to help this unfortunate soul. She returned to New Zealand and galvanised the help of ROMAC, St Johns Rotary, Parnell Rotary and a number of specialist surgeons to perform corrective surgery on Varayame.
She was passionate about making a documentary of the entire story and managed to convince our guest speaker, PAULA JONES of the film school, to allow her to undertake the venture. The school broke all the rules and gave permission for Sarah to travel to Fiji to begin filming, and this is when Paula became involved. They encountered enormous political barriers to do the filming, but won through in the end. Sarah clocked up 240 hours of film on a Canon 5D camera. This camera did not possess audio capability so this all had to be synchronised in afterwards. An enormous task that would take many, many days to accomplish.
Finance was a problem to begin with, however TV NZ came to the party and decided to adopt the doco., provided there was a professional director appointed to oversee the project. This came to pass and work began in earnest. Filming was completed by the end of 2011 and then went to processing. Paula described in great detail the technical processes involved in producing the film, including the difficulties encountered in the synchronising the audio, transcribing 250 hours of filming from three languages, English, Fijian and Indian. All to produce 1 hour of documentary. Production has been held up by other events such as the London Olympics and other priorities.
No screening date has as yet been set. The doco will screen on TV and at film festivals around the world.
Latest news on Varayame is that he is enrolled in a course at the Fiji Vocational & Technical Training Centre For Persons With Disabilities (FVTTCPD) He's been chosen for the disabled games in Brisbane and is training. He is looking forward to doing his best in the games.
