NO RETURN ADDRESS

They grew up in New Zealand, Australia, the US but after being released from prison they’re deported to Tonga where they scratch a living in what sometimes feels like an alien culture. Gangsters in Paradise is a documentary about criminals deported back t

Freelance photographer Todd Henry was holidaying in Tonga in 2011 with his wife and young son when his lyrical and distinctly American accent caught the ear of local ’Ila Mo’unga at a Nuku’alofa cafe´ .

Henry, who was born and raised in a small Pennsylvania farming town, has called New Zealand home since 2003 when he set about swapping his working holiday visa for residency, enticed by the natural beauty and multicultural mix of people he saw living here. ‘‘People don’t really make a big deal about where you’re from and I like that.’’

He’s a citizen now, his wife ’Anau Mesui-Henry is a Tonganborn New Zealander and their kids were born here but his accent’s stuck. Mo’unga was drawn to it because it matched his own.

‘‘He was like, ‘Where you from?’ – with a real American accent,’’ Henry recalled. ‘‘I thought, ‘That’s interesting’ so we got talking…’’

His story, unfolding first over days and then years as the friendship grew, contained the explanation for Mo’unga’s own accent: he was a deportee.

Born in Tonga, he grew up in America until a jail sentence for violent crime broke the conditions of his US residency status. A juvenile when sentenced, he was immediately and permanently deported to Tonga as soon as he’d served his sentence, left to navigate a country and a culture that was more foreign than familiar.

‘‘What really interested me was that culturally he’s American but in terms of his nationality he’s not,’’ says Henry.

‘‘The complexities of this guy’s experience is just through the roof. I felt like, man, I can go back to America any time but here he is and he can’t.’’

Current estimates put the number of deportees in Tonga at around 1000 – the total population of the Pacific Island is 110,000. Exact figures are difficult to obtain but most deportees come from America, Australia and New Zealand – where permanent residents who commit a serious crime are, by law, required to be deported the day their sentence is complete.

There is no reintegration programme when the deportees arrive back in Tonga: no language lessons, cultural guidance, or job placement. The lucky ones have relatives or friends, money, a place to stay and maybe family land to return to. Many do not. After being escorted by police through the airport, they are left on the curb with just a passport and a ban on ever returning to the country where they’ve spent most of their lives.

They’re also left with the stigma of their criminal past: in a small country, that’s hard to shake.

Timely, given the current global rhetoric around deportation, these human complexities are explored in a Vice documentary released this month. Deportees of Tonga – Gangsters in Paradise, of which Henry is associate producer, is one of four documentaries in the Zealandia series, funded by NZ On Air and available on the Vice website.

HENRY, who has been photographing Mo’unga and other deportees for years, recently pitched the idea to journalist James Borrowdale, hoping he’d be keen to write a story. An excited Borrowdale told producer Ursula Williams, who suggested a documentary. ‘‘It went to the next level, like beyond my expectations,’’ says Henry.

The project took Henry, Williams and a small New Zealand crew more than three months to complete. This included a week filming in Tonga, where Henry’s contacts and local help on the ground found four deportees willing to tell their story on camera: American deportees Mo’unga and Sione Ngaue, who Henry knew, and Taila’uli Prescott and Sione Moli from New Zealand.

The result is powerful and moving. The only voices are those of the four men rising clearly to the surface.

‘‘It ain’t a place to live when you’re barely making ends meet. It’s like crabs being stuck in a bucket, scratching, trying to get out,’’ says Sione Moli to the camera.

He spent three years in jail before being deported, his wife and children left behind in New Zealand. He wants to be a social worker, displaying throughout the documentary – which never glosses over the harm caused by the deportee’s criminal behaviour – an impressive level of self-awareness.

‘‘Surprisingly, being honest, sometimes it’s bad at the start,’’ he says.

‘‘Once you let it all out then you don’t have this cloud hanging over you. I don’t want to make excuses for what I did.

‘‘I accept it but at the same time I feel like I did my punishment. I’ve been here six years and I still feel like home is back home, like a Kiwi.’’

‘What really interested me was that culturally ’Ila is American but in terms of his nationality he’s not. I felt like, man, I can go back to America any time but here he is and he can’t.’ TODD HENRY, ABOVE ‘It ain’t a place to live when you’re barely making ends meet. It’s like crabs being stuck in a bucket, scratching, trying to get out.’ SIONE MOLI

Making the documentary was emotional. Williams, who is part Samoan and part New Zealand European and did a masters degree specialising in documentary philosophy, pins the story’s importance on its universal themes: ‘‘I mean we’re