[1] Tiatia's mother emigrated to Auckland from Samoa in the 1960s in order to find a job in a factory as part of a government push to bolster the country's growing economy.

[4] Tiatia's mother was wary of her daughter beginning a career in the arts, which she considered a difficult field with not much hope of financial reward.

Tiatia no longer considers herself religious, citing her experience as a questioning child in Sunday school as an example of the curious nature that led her away from her Christian upbringing.

[2] Tiatia later addressed the similarities and contradictions of the religious and modelling worlds in her 2014 art pieces Heels and Walking the Wall, which see her openly displaying her sacred malu, or female-specific Samoan tattoo.

For Tiatia, this demonstration meant confronting a cultural taboo from her childhood while simultaneously embracing and examining the symbols of female sexuality that she had come across in her modeling.

[5] Tiatia intends her work to call attention to culture's interaction with the commodification of body and place brought on by neocolonialism.

[11] In a single take, the five-minute film uses a cast of 30 performers, playing 60 characters, to tell the story of the 1942 battle in a full 360-degree navigation of the space, ending with Tiatia and her camera crew's own image.

[7][11] While the work was commissioned by the Australian War Memorial with the intention of telling a specific historical story, Tiatia also considered The Fall an opportunity to hold a mirror up to modern political turmoil.