Before the Moon Falls

Special Mention – Best International Feature, 2025 Doc Edge Festival

Kimberlee Bassford spent eight years documenting Sia Figiel, assembling footage with the care of threading flowers into an ula. Her film followed Samoa’s most celebrated writer—the woman who broke silence around women’s sexuality in Pacific literature—from literary triumph complicated by bipolar disorder to personal tragedy. But in 2024, Figiel killed fellow writer Dr. Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard, and the garland snapped.

BEFORE THE MOON FALLS begins as celebration and becomes witnessing: brilliance and destruction held in one frame. Figiel said writing required “pain or suffering or trauma that has to be endured in order to see the whole.” She lived this truth completely. As Samoa’s first woman novelist, Figiel challenged colonial and religious mandates while carrying intergenerational trauma. Bassford’s camera stays present through it all—the spasmodic treatments, the family fractures, the moments when medication stopped and mainland exile began.

Like the Southern Cross that guides Pacific navigators, Figiel was a star by which others steered. Now fallen, she has us ask: How do we reckon with the full humanity of those whose light illuminates and burns?

– Anthony Yooshin Kim