With a New Zealand mother and Papua New Guinean father, Aila-Unsworth has always been pulled between cultures. “I was born in Papua New Guinea but moved to New Zealand when I was about four,” she says. “I’ve only been back once and that was to go and meet my father, my real father… It’s a part of me that I’m yet to fully explore.”

It was the need to better understand her Papua New Guinean culture that prompted Aila-Unsworth to make her first film ‘Yu Bilong Weh?’ (Pidgin for “where are you from?”), a documentary about Wellington’s Papua New Guinean community.

“Because I grew up with my mother – who’s pakeha and from a white family – I never really felt like I could own my Papua New Guineaness. Part of doing this film was me going ‘Ok I’ve got to own my Papua New Guineaness in this country’ - because I’d kind of shied away from it – and just stick it out there that I really didn’t know my identity when it comes to being Papua New Guinean.

“It started off as an idea, from a personal point of view being mixed race and saying ‘well what does this mean?’ and also because I feel that Papua New Guinean is a Pacific culture in New Zealand that’s almost non-existent. You never hear about other Papua New Guineans. You never meet other Papua New Guineans.”

Aila-Unsworth was 24 when she went back to meet her father. “It was really intense. I hadn’t been ready until then. Emotionally it was huge. I realised when I got there that there was a lot of grief in me, a lot of sadness saying good bye to my father and grandmother and just sadness surrounding the country itself. I’d never comprehended that I’d physically missed the country.”

Aila-Unsworth’s second short film, ‘Blue Willow’, is a 2D animation which retells the old Chinese legend attached to the famous Blue Willow ceramics pattern – the most popular design in Western pottery for almost 200 years. Designed by Thomas Milton in 1780, the pattern features two lovers - Koong-se, the daughter of a rich mandarin and Chang, his secretary – fleeing the daughter’s angry father who is in hot pursuit.

“I think it was one of the first stories I heard as a child. There was another story that I loved which was also a Chinese story; they were my favourite two stories. My first impression of it was when I was about six, so I’ve always held that impression. I don’t think I’ve ever looked at it as an adult… I was fascinated by the magic of it. For me it’s always been a fairy tale.

“Another one of the main things was the idea of father. I mean it’s really embarrassing now, when I look back on it, that it’s so obvious that I’ve got an issue with my father. But I think this is very much a story about a father who wanted this or that for his daughter, and I suspect that aspect also intrigued me because I didn’t have a proper father at the time I watched it.

“Right from the start I wanted it to look like a child had done it. I was actually originally going to do it with cardboard cutouts. I had drawn the characters and cut them out in cardboard and started painting them, and I was going to move the cardboard and do it in stop motion. But then my tutor said ‘do you know you could this on computer and it would be much easier and you could make it longer?’
“When I first went into it I went ‘animation, you can do anything. Characters…you name it they can do it’. They can keep living and never die sort of thing. You’re given so many options. I didn’t realise how overwhelmed I’d be by all the options you could have, how in a way that’s limiting.

“I wrote it before I’d decided how I was going to do it. I realised I was either going to have to work with existing conventions or define my own conventions. And with each convention all these rules come, all these expectations that the audience would have. In the end I decided to create my own because if I took on board any of the others I would have made it hard for myself.”