In one scene of Inky Pinky Ponky, the new movie based on the play by Amanaki Prescott-Faletau and co-starring New Zealand breakout star JP Foliaki, the main character Lisa (Prescott-Faletau) has applied makeup to get ready for school. Her mom removes it in a frustrated frenzy yelling that she’s a boy and should act accordingly.
It’s a poignant moment in the film, which was recently screened at Philadelphia's Black Star Film Festival, a week-long program dedicated to amplifying the work of POC filmmakers. Lisa is fakaleitī, a Tongan word for a third gender of people who are assigned male at birth but express in a more feminine way ("In the manner of/like a woman/women" is the literal translation), and her journey is a masterful coming-of-age story that deftly balances the struggles Lisa faces with the excitement of being a teenager experiencing love for the first time. Charm is infused into Lisa’s complex and often isolating experience in a high school full of haters.
“A lot of these experiences are birthed from truth,” Prescott-Faletau, who is also fakaleitī, tells Teen Vogue. In real life, Prescott-Faletau's mother got mad because she shaved her eyebrows. She remembers experiencing unwelcome church environments or welcome only when they needed her.
“Religion is [embedded] so deep into our culture that they tend to just ignore us [fakaleitī] — unless they need someone to do hair and makeup at church or decorate your wedding or to teach the youth at church a dance number, then we're like, praised,” she says. But then after that, it's just like, ‘Okay, you go back and hide in the kitchen, cook and clean where you belong.’”
Inky Pinky Ponky began as a play inspired by her first heartbreak and was written as a class assignment in drama school. It’s a well-trod pipeline, moving from the stage to the big screen: before Tarell Alvin McCraney won an Academy Award for Moonlight, he wrote the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, his semi-autobiographical story of growing up gay in South Florida. Before Rent was adapted into a Hollywood movie musical, Jonathan Larson's genius showed on Broadway in the 1990s as a pivotal marker of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
After presenting it multiple times to larger and larger groups, Inky Pinky Ponky eventually was made into a book and picked up by New Zealand's Auckland Theater Company. "We hired this cheap rundown hall and invited all the theater companies that we could think of in Auckland," she tells Teen Vogue about its early days. "We're like, 'Hey, come along to a play reading, just trying to sell it.' We had biscuits and tea and hot chocolates from home."
Success with real audiences almost guarantees the story, if at its core is intriguing and witty and nuanced, will be received well on film. And for queer people — particularly those who live at the fringes of society — what they create is constantly under scrutiny and is quietly tested before presenting to a wider public. This formula worked in Prescott-Faletau's favor. She’s noticed that her art has resonated with young people, especially.
"In high schools, people are doing [the play] for their school productions and the school assessments and drama school end-of-year productions,” she says. “And so it popped off here in New Zealand really quickly."
In the film, Lisa navigates transphobia and a religious mother who doesn't understand her, comes up against a mean girl, saves prom, and falls in love with a boy (played by the gorgeous JP Foliaki). She's witty and light, not unphased by the world but not tarnished by it either.
“The world needs to be educated,” Prescott-Faletau says. “I want to write about a trans CEO and girls who are running businesses. I'm in a position to educate. We all have a purpose in this world, and I guess I need to fulfill my purpose.” Always with a punchline, she adds, “I can't complain. It's still giving me coin.”
Inky Pinky Ponky will hit audiences soon.
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