Sima Urale
As a visual storyteller, Sima Urale holds onto the Samoan oral tradition of storytelling or fagogo, and adds a contemporary twist. In telling Pacific stories, she is influenced by her Samoan heritage, and the experience of living in urban Aotearoa. Urale's experience as an actor has also proven invaluable in her directing career.
Urale immigrated from a small village in Samoa to Island Bay in Wellington, around the age of seven. The fourth child of a large family — many of who would end up in the arts — she hated school rules, and took lunch breaks on her own timetable. Her mother was a teacher, while her funny, larger than life father worked in a carpet factory. Sima attributes her mother's "openness to everything and anything" as a huge factor in the family later moving into the arts and the media.
At 19, after time on a government-funded acting course, Sima was encouraged to apply for a place at drama school Toi Whakaari. Her classmates included Cliff Curtis, Tim Balme, Hori Ahipene and future author Emily Perkins; Perkins recalls Urale as being "earthy and strong" in an end of year production of The Cherry Orchard.
After graduating Urale joined television sketch show Skitz, where among other parts she played terrifying Samoan Aunt Mimi. She would reprise the role in short-lived spin-off The Semisis. She also played a social worker in tele-play Swimming Lessons, and won a Chapman Tripp award for Samoan play Think of a Garden. The play's director Nathaniel Lees labelled her acting as "extraordinary".
After two years as an actor, Urale realised she wanted to create stories that, in the words of Herald writer Greg Dixon, "appealed to a broader — and browner — audience". After friends and family pulled together to help with her application, she won a place at Melbourne's Victorian College of the Arts Film and Television (formerly Swinburne). She won the VCA Encouragement Student Award, and in 1994 graduated with a bachelors degree in arts, film and television.
On returning home to Wellington, she wrote and directed acclaimed short film O Tamaiti (1996). Shot in black and white (in order to bypass "kitsch" stereotypes of Samoans) and filmed in Samoan, it focused on a young boy forced to play parent in devastating circumstances. Urale writes about the background to the film here.
O Tamaiti made for a powerful debut. It won an impressive trolley of awards, including Best Short at the Venice Film Festival, Best NZ Short, and another at the Chicago Film Festival. Hollywood began knocking, but Urale wanted to concentrate on developing her craft at home.
In this period producer Vincent Burke proposed to Urale a project about velvet painting. Urale signed on for her first documentary, once Burke agreed to let her concentrate less on painting techniques, and more on eccentric velvet artist Charlie McPhee. The result was Velvet Dreams, made for TVNZ's Work of Art series. Ironic and playful it explores stereotypical 'dusky maiden' images of bare-breasted South Seas maidens painted on velvet. It screened at the NZ and Hawai'i Film Festivals, and won Best Documentary Award at Canada's Yorkton Short Film and Video Festival.
Urale's second short Still Life (2001) focused on the challenges of ageing for a closeknit Pākehā couple. The first Kiwi short to take the top prize at the Montreal World Film Festival, it received a Special Mention Award at Switzerland's Locarno Film Festival, and three more at the local fest Drifting Clouds.
Urale went on to appear with her filmmaking sister Makerita in — and direct for — arts show The Living Room. Her first music video Sub-Cranium Feeling, shot underwater for her brother King Kapisi, scored a trio of awards for Best Music Video. Later it won an NZ On Air 1000 Music Video Celebration Award. Urale explored the local hip hop scene further with her 2003 documentary Hip Hop New Zealand.
The same year Urale won the first Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writers' Residency at the University of Hawai'i. In 2006 she spent six months in Amsterdam as part of the Mauritz Binger Script Development Programme, working on her long-in-development feature project Moana, which she described in 2008 as "the baby I need to have".
After returning to New Zealand, Urale showed her sensitivity to character with outsider tale Coffee & Allah, the tale of a Muslim Ethopian woman immigrant. The film was written by Indian-born emigre Shuchi Kothari, who had been won over by the distinctive "Sima Urale mood"; the way her films walked "a delicate line between light and dark", balancing buoyancy and darkness. Coffee & Allah was shot by frequent Urale collaborator Rewa Harre, who, in Urale's words, "has the patience and peaceful nature of the Dalai Lama".
Kothari then succeeded in winning over Urale with her own feature film idea. Apron Strings, the result, interweaves the lives of two sets of sons and mothers. One mother is Indian (played by Brit-born Laila Rouass), one Pākehā (Jennifer Ludlam). Both are trying to find the courage to confront secrets from their past. Selected for the Toronto International Film Festival, Apron Strings also opened the 2008 Auckland Film Festival. Festival boss Bill Gosden said it was "irresistable" to mark the festival's 40th year in Auckland by opening with "such a strong" Auckland film.
Urale's interest in social themes has also flavoured the commercials she works on. Aside from a beloved Vogel's Bread ad, flavoured by Chris Knox classic 'Not Given Lightly', she has directed a number of health-related spots, including campaigns on cervical screening and family violence. Urale's advertising work has seen her filming everywhere from Malaysia to New York. She has also spent time in Samoa and Fiji, upskilling Pacific Islanders in making commercials.
"Training and transferring the discipline to other people that wouldn't necessarily have the option of going to film school is really fulfilling," she said in an Arts Foundation interview. "You're making an impact, opening them up to something that they've never thought of before."
In 2010 Urale began lecturing at Unitech Film and Television School. From mid 2012 until mid 2015, she was Head Tutor at Wellington's NZ Film and Television School. In 2019 she was awarded for her incredible contributions to the industry, with both a $50,000 Gender Scholarship from the NZ Film Commission, and an Arts Laureate Award.
The early 2020s brought a slew of television directing gigs. In 2021 Urale helmed TV movie The Tender Trap, which told the true story of Sharon Armstrong. Played by Rima Te Wiata in an award-winning performance, Armstrong was a grandmother and respected public servant, who fell prey to a dangerous romance scam. "What appealed to me most about the story is that it reveals how fragile the human heart is," Urale said in a 2021 interview with the Golden Globes website.
Alongside fellow Samoan-Kiwi Oscar Kightley, Urale also directed episodes of 2022's Duckrockers, a prequel featuring the characters from hit comedy movie Sione's Wedding. She has also directed episodes of crime shows The Brokenwood Mysteries and My Life is Murder.
In 2022 she was awarded the Tautai Award at the Women in Film and Television (WIFT) Awards. The honour recognizes a Pasifika filmmaker who has made a significant contribution to the industry.
"I think I just want to be doing what I like doing to the day I die," Urale told the Golden Globes website in 2021. "Sometimes I like to paint and sometimes I write, and now and again I will get the itch to direct and make a film." She feels "extremely fortunate" to have options in terms of what she chooses to do.
Profile updated on 14 April 2025
Sources include
'Interview with Sima Urale' (Video Interview), NZ On Screen website. Director Clare O'Leary. Loaded 1 November 2008. Accessed 21 February 2025
Tina Jøhnk Christensen, 'Love Can Make You Blind: Interview with Sima Urale on “The Tender Trap”' (Interview), Golden Globes website. Loaded 29 June 2021. Accessed 21 February 2025
Greg Dixon, 'Frame of mind' (Interview) - The NZ Herald, 6 August 2008
Michael Fitzgerald, 'Shaking Up the Happy Isles' (Interview) - Time magazine, 25 July 2005
David O'Donnell, 'Everything is family: David O'Donnell interviews Nathaniel Lees', in Performing Aotearoa: New Zealand Drama and Theatre in an Age of Transition, edited by Marc Maufort and David O'Donnell (Brussels, PIE Peter Lang, 2007), page 331
Graeme Tuckett, 'The Interview: Sima Urale' FishHead website. Loaded 29 May 2014. Accessed 21 February 2025
'Interview with Sima Urale' (broken link), Flicks website. Loaded 18 August 2008. Accessed 21 February 2025
Unknown author, 'Still Life wins award' - Onfilm, October 2008 (Volume 18, number 10), page 8
Unknown author, 'An interview with the 2019 Arts Foundation Laureate receiving the Burr/Tatham Trust Award' (Interview), The Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi website. Loaded 31 August 2021. Accessed 14 January 2025