Celebrated Fijian New Zealand filmmaker and playwright Toa Fraser has been selected as this year’s recipient of the three month Fulbright- Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer’s Residency at the University of Hawai’i. Fraser will use the residency to write his second draft of the screenplay for a film adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Beach at Falesá. The project was previously attempted by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, whose version never made it to screen. More recently, Alan Sharp, wrote the screenplay for Fraser’s latest film Dean Spanley, attempted his own screenplay of The Beach at Falesá. He recently handed the project over to Fraser, who will finalise the screenplay and direct the film. Fraser sees it as “a conversation between Stevenson, Sharp (and to a lesser extent Dylan Thomas) and myself” in which he aims to provide authentic roles and voices for Pacific characters in the story. Fraser hopes to begin shooting the new film on location in Samoa in 2010. He is the sixth New Zealand writer to take up the Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer’s Residency at the University of Hawai’i, following in the footsteps of fellow filmmaker Sima Urale, playwright Victor Rodger and several others.
