Tuna: A Fish with a Special Place in My Heart (2012)
★½ — Tuna: A Fish with a Special Place in My Heart (2012)
There are short films, and then there are short films. At a brisk fourteen minutes, Tuna: A Fish with a Special Place in My Heart (2012) sits firmly in the latter category. Made in Palau, a small island nation in the western Pacific, the film is the personal work of Ongerung Kambes Kesolei, who serves as both director and on-screen presence. Palau is not a country with a prolific film output, which makes any cinematic work from there something of a rarity worth paying attention to, even when the subject matter is, well, fish. Kesolei uses the short runtime to trace a very specific emotional thread: the relationship between himself, his family history, and the tuna that runs through both like a common current.
As a piece of documentary filmmaking, it sits in a long tradition of first-person, memoir-driven non-fiction work, where the camera becomes less a journalistic tool and more a means of personal reflection. Think of it as the video essay before the video essay became everyone's go-to format. There is no studio attribution attached to the production, and the modest scale of the thing is apparent from the outset. This is not the polished but unremarkable kind of documentary that gets a theatrical run and a poster campaign. It is something more homemade, shaped entirely by one person's desire to put something of themselves on screen. Whether that is a strength or a limitation rather depends on what you come looking for. For other documentary films of varying scale and ambition, it is worth having a look at my review of Next Goal Wins, or the rather different experience of Nom Tèw, another short documentary that operates on its own quiet terms.
Kesolei as a filmmaker and subject is inseparable here. There is no distance between the person behind the camera and the story being told, and the casting, if you can call it that, reflects exactly that. The film lives or dies on your willingness to spend time with one person's recollections, and the connective tissue holding those recollections together is, consistently, tuna. It is a genuinely unusual premise for a documentary, and the geographical and cultural specificity of Palau gives it a context that most viewers will likely know very little about going in.
A-Z World Movie Tour Palau All about this guy and his memories basically. He narrates and recalls his life at various points and how it connects to family and tuna. Always tuna. It's pretty basic, in terms of selfie style vocals, b-roll footage. It was pretty interesting but only if you care about tuna.
I picked this one up as part of my A-Z World Movie Tour, and that context matters. When you are working through films by country, you occasionally land on something that exists almost entirely outside the usual critical conversation, and this is one of those. It is not trying to be Ben Fogle and the Buried City or anything with a broadcaster behind it. It is one man, his memories, and his fish. I find something quietly admirable in that, even when the execution is rough around the edges. Whether it stays with you probably depends on how much patience you have for personal documentary on this kind of micro scale, and, as noted, your feelings about tuna. Mine are fairly neutral, as it happens.
Rating: ★½ | Year: 2012 | Watched: 2025-08-08
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Tuna: A Fish with a Special Place in My Heart (2012) on YouTube
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