Genre Documentary

Nauru 1973 (2008)

Item: Nauru 1973
Rating: 1.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★ — Nauru 1973 (2008)

Right, so. The A-Z World Movie Tour has taken me to some strange corners of Letterboxd, but Nauru might be the strangest stop yet. And I say that with genuine affection, because "strange" is about the kindest word I can reach for.

Nauru 1973 is a home movie. Four minutes long. No dialogue, no narration, no score. Just a reel of what looks like 8mm footage of a small island in the Pacific, shot fifty years ago by someone who was simply there, living their life, pointing a camera at the world around them. That's it. That's the film.

And here's where it gets genuinely odd. There's something deeply voyeuristic about watching someone else's family holiday footage. You'd feel it if a friend pulled out their parents' old Super 8 reels at a dinner party. But this is on YouTube, and 55,000 people have already watched it. Fifty-five thousand strangers peering into someone's private memory of an island most of them will never visit. I'm not sure what to make of that, honestly. It doesn't feel wrong exactly, but it doesn't feel entirely comfortable either. There's a peculiar intimacy to it that sits oddly when you frame it as a "film" to be rated and reviewed.

And yet, here I am, rating and reviewing it. One star, since you're asking, though I'll admit that feels a bit like marking someone's holiday snaps out of ten. The star isn't really a verdict on the footage itself, which is perfectly decent 8mm material of a place and time that genuinely no longer exists in that form. It's more a verdict on the experience of encountering it as part of a cinema project. It doesn't work as a film. It barely registers as a short. It's an artefact.

Nauru as a subject is fascinating in its own right, a tiny island nation with a genuinely remarkable and deeply troubled modern history, which makes it all the more frustrating that this is what represents it on the list. I found myself wanting something, anything, to give the images some context. A voice, a caption, a sense of whose hands held that camera and why. Without any of that, I'm just watching grainy palm trees and squinting at the horizon wondering if I'm missing the point.

Compare it to something like Candomblé in Togo (1972), another short film from a similar era that I covered for this project. That one at least had a sense of purpose, a reason to exist as a document. This feels like it ended up on the list almost by accident, because somebody uploaded a home video and tagged it correctly.

I'll be honest, I need to go and find another Nauruan film, if such a thing exists. This can't be the representative entry. It'd be like someone cataloguing British cinema and landing on someone's cine footage of a Blackpool holiday in 1971. Charming, sure. Cinema, no.

One star. And I say that not unkindly, but firmly. On to the next country.

Rating: ★ | Year: 2008 | Watched: 2025-07-27

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