Vilsoni Hereniko (Rotuman), The Land Has Eyes (Pear ta ma 'on maf) is the first feature film by Vilsoni Hereniko, premiering at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. Hereniko has written numerous plays and books, and has directed short films. In 1997 he received a grant from the Hubert Bals Fund to write the screenplay for The Land Has Eyes, which was produced by Te Maka Productions, a company owned by Vilsoni and Jeanette Hereniko. An accomplished scholar and a professor of Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawai'I, Hereniko is the editor of The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs and was the founding editor of Tanaloa: Pacific Literature Series. The University of Hawai'i gave him a Presidential Citation for Meritorious Teaching in 2000. He received a doctorate in literature and language from the University of the South Pacific in 1991. The youngest of eleven children, he was raised in Mea on the island of Rotuma in Fiji and lives in Honolulu, Hawai'i.