A ROOF FOR TIIRETA

The construction of a hut and its roof in homage to Tiireta, a stillborn child, on the island of Butaritari, Kiribati.

  • François ROSOLATO
    Director
  • François ROSOLATO
    Producer
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Short
  • Runtime:
    23 minutes 14 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    December 15, 2023
  • Country of Origin:
    France
  • Country of Filming:
    Kiribati
  • Shooting Format:
    HD
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16/9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Distribution Information
  • SILIR PRODUCTION
    Distributor
    Country: Worldwide
    Rights: All Rights
Director Biography - François ROSOLATO

François Rosolato was born in Paris in 1963. Guided to its sorrow towards a well-trodden path, he reluctantly began studying medicine. He deserts the benches of Jussieu for the benefit of the seats of the Cinémathèque Française and finally passes in secret the competition of the Louis Lumière national school where he is admitted in the image section. After graduating in 1986, he worked as a cinematographer on other people's films while developing his own projects. He likes to go back and forth, to change places to change views.
Between fiction and documentary, François Rosolato is fascinated by those moments when actors blur the lines, like Bette Davis defying the Hollywood order. For him, when fiction is overwhelmed by the strangeness of its performers, or when in a documentary the people filmed escape the role that society has assigned them, it is the cinema that recovers its freedom.
His first documentary film JEAN-PAUL MICHEL (selected in the BILAN DU FILM ETHNOGRAPHIQUE), about a farmer's son who wants to become a circus acrobat, sets the tone for his filmography. Destinies, determinism and freedom are at the heart of each of his films.
THE FLYING KIRIBATI, currently in development, with its Homeric epic allure, is no exception to the corpus and questions in its own way the idea of fatality.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

This film is dedicated to TIIRETA, the stillborn child of Enre and Charisma.
My daughter Clarisse is born the same day where Tiireta was stillborn, and the strangeness of this coincidence, when the parents asked me to film the construction of the tomb, is behind this film.
I was in Butaritari, the island described by Robert-Louis Stevenson in SOUTH SEAS, for the filming of my documentary THE FLYING KIRIBATI, and I jumped at this unexpected opportunity to keeping track of a society where grave construction is not outsourced.
Indeed, everyone in Kiribati's islands is still capable of building a bwuia (a house for sleeping and passing the time) or renewing a roof.
The dead are very present in Kiribati society. Before the arrival of the missionaries, the skull of the ancestor was often caressed to keep him at peace with the living.
The family and the village were able to watch the film on YouTube.