Grey Lynn’s last kava club | STILL HERE S2 | Episode 4

By Four and Five Films

“The strength of the Tongan culture is in the kava.”

For 45 years, one of Grey Lynn’s last remaining Tongan families has proudly hosted their fofo’anga faikava kalapu (kava club) from their home. Each week the Koloamatangi family welcomes generations of Tongan men to drink kava, sing songs and share history with each other. 

In 1978 this fofo’anga was the first faikava club established outside of Tonga, the same year the United Church of Tonga was opened up the road – the first Tongan church established in Aotearoa New Zealand. 

STILL HERE is a love letter to our inner-city Auckland Pasifika community. Since the 1950s, the Pasifika community has cultivated a unique Central Auckland identity that many of the community’s youth proudly embrace; both as an act of resistance from ongoing gentrification and as an unapologetic reminder that they and their families are Still Here.

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Grey Lynn’s last kava club | STILL HERE S2 | Episode 4

“The strength of the Tongan culture is in the kava.”

Still Here Season 2

STILL HERE Season 2 season follows Aotearoa’s first multi-generational kava club, a predominantly Polynesian rugby league club that's been around for more than 100 years, a small community fighting to keep the Niuean language alive, and the challenge to keep the first Samoan fale built for Samoan people in the hands of Samoans. This series exists as a cultural taonga for generations that have been before us and those that are yet to come.

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