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MR MOVIES
THE PNG FILMMAKER TAKING ON THE WORLD BY RUBY GAMOGA | PHOTOGRAPHS: SUPPLIED
Switching careers in the middle of your medical residency may not be the most ideal time to change your mind, but that is precisely what Papua New Guinean filmmaker Spenser Wangare did. “It wasn’t my passion,” Wangare says of his medical residency. “I wasn’t interested in working in a hospital.” Wangare’s first short film, though, had a medical theme. The film, Epidemic, is about the lifestyle causes of diabetes. “It screened at the PNG Human Rights Festival countrywide in 2016,” says Wangare. “Studying medicine showed me the impact of lifestyle diseases and in my film I wanted to address this indirectly. To influence people indirectly.” Wangare, from Kolobi village in Enga Province, has been on a remarkable film journey since then. Projects he has worked on have been streamed on Apple TV and Amazon Prime, and one of his 18 PNG NOW JUNE–AUGUST 2022
latest collaborations, Deep Rising, which explores the environmental and cultural consequences of a controversial deep-sea mine proposed by Canadian company Nautilus Minerals, will premiere at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. “We just got the acceptance letter,” Wangare says. His journey has been even more remarkable because the film industry is struggling to get off the ground in PNG, even though it’s just been granted the ability to submit films for consideration at the Academy Awards (see our story on Page 21). While things might be looking up for Wangare, they haven’t always been that way. “Until the last two years, I never made much money from filmmaking,” he says. “It took me seven to eight years to get to where I am. The number one issue has been funding. For first timers wanting to get funding in the industry, it is very complicated. But after you make yourself known, it can get a bit easier.”
