Samoa's first feature film, The Orator (O Le Tulafale), was released in 2011.
It was produced with financial support from the Samoan government, in the hopes of showcasing Samoan culture to an international audience, and of promoting Samoa as a tourist destination.
[1] Before this, Samoa had only produced short films.
Tusi Tamasese, the writer and director of The Orator, had previously written and directed the short film Sacred Spaces (Va Tapuia), which was screened in 2010 at the New Zealand International Film Festival, then at the imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival in Toronto and the Hawaii International Film Festival.
Both The Da Vinci Code and Milk have been banned from screening in Samoa's cinema, the latter for being "inappropriate and contradictory to Christian beliefs and Samoan culture".