Butterfly / Bataplai
2023 · 8m · USA
Directed by Veialu Aila-Unsworth
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, provocative, tender
A Papua New Guinean-American woman defies her evangelist father's rules to pursue makeup artistry, negotiating diaspora, Indigenous roots, and Western identity.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise sounds like a dozen coming-of-age diaspora stories until you realize the film is actually about makeup as a language—a way of claiming visibility that has nothing to do with Western assimilation and everything to do with refusal, which most films about Indigenous identity are too polite to examine.
Aila-Unsworth locates herself in a lineage of intimate portraiture—the essay film tradition—but the formal decision to let makeup application sequences breathe alongside family confrontation suggests a filmmaker thinking carefully about how beauty work and cultural negotiation occupy the same frame.
The crucial move here is treating makeup not as frivolous or as rebellion-aesthetic, but as a genuine craft practice with its own rigor; the film earns its tenderness by respecting the specificity of her hands, her choices, her vision—that's where the whole thing lives.