What Vilsoni Hereniko had in mind was a movie about his native Rotuma. It would be shot there, and it have Rotuman actors in it.

There were a few niggling problems. Most people on the tiny island of 2,500 souls 300 miles north of Fiji had never seen a movie, much less been in one. And Hereniko had neither studio backing nor the million dollars he figured the movie would cost. And although he could see the story’s main outline clearly, he was suffering a bad case of writer’s block.

That was eight years ago. The movie Hereniko ultimately wrote and directed, "The Land Has Eyes," is Fiji’s first indigenous film. The story of a young girl’s struggle opened Thursday at the Ashland Independent Film Festival. It will be shown again at 9 p.m. Saturday.

On Thursday afternoon tickets were released for several other pictures earlier listed as sold-out. Check with the box office for availability.

The struggles of independent filmmakers are legendary, and Hereniko is no exception.

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"It’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life," he says in a telephone interview from Hawaii shortly before flying to Ashland for the festival.

"The Land Has Eyes" premiered at Sundance last year, where it was an official festival selection, and went on to festivals in Montreal, New York and Toronto, where it was named best dramatic feature. Over the past two weeks, it has outdrawn all the Hollywood blockbusters on Honolulu movie screens in its first commercial release.

The film is the story of Viki (Sapeta Taito), a young girl whose father is unjustly convicted of stealing from a neighbor, which brings crushing disgrace upon the entire family in the island’s close-knit culture.

Hereniko based the story on a real incident involving his father. He was stuck in the writing until his wife, Jeanette, suggested changing the young man, essentially himself as a boy of 14, to a young woman. Bingo.

"It was better," he says. "She became linked with Warrior Woman (a legendary figure based on the island’s origin myth). It raises the stakes for her. Boys had more privileges on the island. For girls it’s much harder. It’s better for the story."

With the story on its legs, the next problem was money. Not only did Hereniko have no studio backing, he had no investors. He and his wife started raising money, took out a second mortgage on their home, cashed in their insurance, risked everything.

The location itself was daunting. The island is hard to get to. The small plane Hereniko hired wound up being unable to take the film crew and gear, so another plane had to be chartered, and generators and food and supplies were loaded on a boat that took three days to make the voyage. The island is hot and humid with little electricity, poor roads and hardly any cars. There was no running water for a week.

A greedy landowner who equated filmmakers with Hollywood money demanded $100,000 for the use of land it turned out he didn’t even own. Somehow, Hereniko finished shooting. But he was out of money.

"We put a few things together," he says. "Raised money showing it around. We raised small sums and started editing."

The breakthrough was when Pacific Islanders in Communications, a nonprofit group funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, heard of Hereniko’s plight and helped out. Then a filmmaker friend in New Zealand came through with an offer of free editing equipment. After the final cut in New Zealand, the picture was finished in January of 2004. It was shot digitally but is being shown in 35-millimeter format.

The festival’s Tom Olbrich heard about the movie on a trip to Hawaii and called Hereniko.

"I looked him up in the phone book," Olbrich says. "I said, ‘Please come to Ashland.’"

It turned out that Hereniko’s wife, Jeanette Paulson Hereniko, had lived in the Rogue Valley for 25 years.

Jeanette shrugs off the risk.

"We’d just been married," she says. "We were running on passion. People in love do that kind of thing. Whatever your dream is, you go for it. We never, never looked back."

In the 1970s, Jeanette lived in Medford. She started the Children’s Festival in Jacksonville and co-founded a storytelling guild. She started and directed the Hawaii International Film Festival in 1980.

"There were plenty of indigenous people who could tell their own stories without Hollywood, thank you very much," she says. She later became a writer and producer for public television.

Hereniko, the youngest of 11 children, lived in Rotuma until he was 16. He graduated from the University of the South Pacific in 1977 and earned a master’s degree in drama at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England. He wrote several plays that were performed throughout the Pacific and made a documentary film, "The Rotuman Clown." He teaches literature, theater and film at the University of Hawaii.

Growing up, along with stories from Greek mythology and the Bible, he heard the Fijian proverb, "The land has teeth and it knows the truth."

The notion seemed to fit with his idea for a story of a young person’s search for redemption for the family name.

There are several conflicts in the picture: between the girl and her society, between tradition and an encroaching modern world, and between different ways of bringing about justice.

"It’s a western system of justice for people who don’t speak English," Hereniko says. "On Rotuma they used to leave it to the spirit world, and to the land. They said the land knows the truth."

The movie explores and juxtaposes the two systems against the background of a land that has eyes, almost a consciousness, as if it were a character in the story.

Although Rotuma is politically part of Fiji, it shares cultural ties with the rest of Polynesia. It was a British colony until Fijian independence and has remained under the Fijian aegis.

Viki is aided by the spirit of Warrior Woman even as she is frustrated by her culture’s collective expectations.

Her father’s dying wish is that she become a lawyer.

"Lawyers lie," she says.

"Be a lawyer who tells the truth," he says.

One of the truths Viki must discover is that although the land may have eyes, it does not determine irrevocably what you will become.

The picture is dedicated to Hereniko’s father and mother.

Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail bvarble@mailtribune.com