Tongan American filmmaker Olivé’s new documentary explores the fragility of myth, memory, and identity

[Mieko Anders]

Still image from “Like Father Like Daughter.” Courtesy of Olivé

In August, the Northwest Film Forum hosted an interactive workshop featuring a rough cut of Olivé’s forthcoming project, Like Father Like Daughter, a slice-of-life documentary short about the filmmaker’s experience living under the same roof as her Japanese ex-boyfriend and Tongan father. By turns heartwarming, reflective, and thought-provoking, the film follows Jacqueline Olivé as she navigates the competing pressures of her various and often conflicting roles as ex-girlfriend, daughter, striving artist, and Tongan American woman. The film will premier as part of a showcase on “Pacific Daughters” at the Hawaii International Film Festival in October, 2026.

Like Father Like Daughter’s unique premise stems from a particularly unconventional real-life situation in which Olivé found herself in 2023: after years living in Japan, she and her Japanese boyfriend moved back to the United States, only for him to break up with her on New Year’s Day. Six months later, he moved in with Olivé — and her mother, and her father, in their family home in Las Vegas.

Throughout the film, Jacqueline comes up against her father’s reluctance to open up to her about their family history, her mother’s off-handed comments about getting back together with her ex, and her own feelings of being alienated from and misunderstood by those closest to her. Inspired by the rawness of cinéma vérité, the film is a bold experiment in working at the boundary that separates life and art.

For instance, while Olivé the director goes by her surname, she refers to her film’s protagonist as Jacqueline. The film highlights this tension by alternating between unsteady lo-fi handycam aesthetics and crisp 4K digital footage.

“Visually, [the handycam footage] is what I believe memory to be: sometimes memory is not always clear. It’s a bit blurry,” Olivé explains. On the other hand, “Jacqueline as a ‘character,’ as a person, is trying to get to that state of the 4K digital, full-color, modern-day screen. Like, we’re building up to get to someplace where she can stop escaping into her fantasies and her memories, and start living in the moment. Because I think that’s a really relatable thing that we’re all living through right now.”

Adding to its hybrid, multi-genre composition, Like Father Like Daughter also incorporates clips of animated, black-and-white manga sequences, which Olivé worked with artists in Tokyo to create. In the film, Jacqueline yearns to return to Japan, a place where she felt in command of her own narrative.

“I’ve found that my own nature as a storyteller has always really connected with Japanese storytellers,” Olivé explains. She herself is fluent in Japanese, and the Japanese language features prominently in the film. “Sometimes I can be more honest in my second language than my first,” she adds.

Of course, filming her own family in such an intimate setting opened up a set of difficult ethical questions that required careful consideration and flexibility on her part. At the same time, she emphasizes the project’s therapeutic dimensions, describing the process of making the film as a kind of “exposure therapy,” as well as the healing possibilities of film in general. The picture she paints of directing is ultimately one of care work, both in terms of care for the participants and for herself.

“I feel like my stories often try to tenderly unravel the weight of memory and community, to confront myths about what we inherit and what we choose to become,” she explains. “Because that’s the most beautiful thing—and the hardest thing, I think—about being human, that it’s not always a joyful time. You do have to struggle and you do have to figure things out.”

2023 was a difficult year for Olivé not only personally, but professionally: amidst the turmoil of the Writers Guild of America strike, she lost her job working as a translator for Apple TV’s Pachinko. In part as a way of coping, she began to focus her attention on writing and filming a documentary on “boys’ love” manga, though she was struggling to find adequate funding for the project.

“I was being pressured a lot to make something Tongan, which was crazy to me, because I was just like, anything I make is Tongan, I’m Tongan,” she laughs.

Eventually, she decided to make a documentary centered around her family, explaining that “my family are the most interesting people I know.” Reactions to the idea, at least initially, were mixed: “Anytime I talked about it with people, it just felt crazy, because nobody believed me. They’d say, is this a new screenplay you’re making? You know, like, what is this? I was like, no, it’s my life!”

Olivé’s work has now been supported by a variety of organizations, including Pacific Islanders in Communications, a company within PBS’s National Multicultural Alliance. Through the fellowship with PIC, she attended the 2024 Seattle International Film Festival, where she was able to see fellow Pacifica director Jalena Keane-Lee’s documentary “Standing Above the Clouds.”

Olivé has plans to turn Like Father Like Daughter into a full-length feature film. She also hopes to one day return to her work on “boys’ love,” among other things. You can follow her work here.

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