Before they became international phenoms; before the inevitable comparisons (Pavarotti); and before Sol3 Mio – the charismatic award-winning trio, are the boys: Pene and Amitai Pati, two of four siblings of parents who emigrated to Aotearoa New Zealand in the 80s. The dark legacy of the Dawn Raids lingers potently; discrimination has a long tail.
In their Māngere home Pene senior and Iulieta Pati also take on his brother’s six children. Ten kids, two adults sharing a home built for five.
Pene and Amitai’s uncle had come to New Zealand seeking treatment for stomach cancer. Sadly, when it becomes clear it’s terminal, says Pene, he makes a final request to their father: that he take his children from Samoa and raise them in New Zealand as his own.
“His intention wasn’t to suggest that life in Samoa is lesser,” says Pene, “but rather that his children might have access to broader opportunities in education and life”.
It’s a promise honoured, in the name of love, respect and family.
Pene and Amitai (L to R) performing as children.
Music swarms all around their childhood. There’s singing and laughter; there’s work, duty and discipline.
“We didn’t even know what a Friday afternoon felt like,” says Pene.
“Everyone’s out doing what they wanna do. We’re like, ‘Nah. This is our Friday afternoon.’”
Every Friday after school, for 15 years, the Pati family piles into the family van and drives to Culverden Retirement Home, where their father and mother are nurses.
They’re a family choir so heavenly, singing to those heading there soon.
The teenage boys rail against it. They try everything, from hiding in cupboards to complaining about fake illnesses. It’s futile.
That grainy, tender footage reveals a tight bond forged by a common purpose: service to others.
“It’s quite eye-opening looking back,” says Amitai.
“Watching all of that old footage I guess helped me put all the pieces of the puzzle together.”
The pieces of the puzzle are richly drawn and complex. As Reverend Mosese Mailo, principal of Piula Theological College, says: “In Samoa, we still have that honour and shame kind of culture. When you do something you are doing it for your parents. It’s your responsibility to honour your family, to honour your village. Especially that last name you are taking around with you wherever you go”.
Deviating from that high bar of expectations meant tough consequences. Oscar Kightley says in the doco that as a kid, he regarded his palagi friends getting a smack as a luxury, comparatively.
But there’s a fine line, says Pene, between discipline and domestic violence.
He recalls coming home as a teenager with a group of friends, going into his sister’s room to get something with the boys, and his father’s subsequent rage at a breach of respect.
When the beating is over, Pene turns to his friends and says, matter of factly, “Okay, let’s go then”.
Amitai and Pene Jnr with their dad, Pene Snr.
For Pene, 39, and Amitai, 37, there’s no residing in the past or in bitterness. Time and reflection have allowed generosity in their adult interpretations. They choose to cauterise the wounds with compassion.
“We’ve had conversations with him [dad] about it,” says Amitai.
“The older we’ve got, the more he’s been able to articulate himself in a way that would help us understand.”
It was tough a lot of the time, and harder, says Amitai, for Pene being the eldest male.
“I don’t hold any resentment against my father at all,” he says.
“I love him to bits, the same as my mum. Because he was only doing what he was taught as a child. He went through the same thing. He was raising us the same way.”
As kids, Pene says, he and his siblings were aware of the distinction between discipline and domestic violence.
“I find it very interesting that even as young men, my brother and I and my sisters, as young women – even though you look back at it now and think, ‘man, that was tough, that was legit domestic violence’ – that we, I, harboured no resentment or no hard feelings even at that moment, because all I saw as a child was this young man dealing with the pressures of life.
“His fear of being deported. He’s trying to get citizenship for his kids. He’s trying to feed these four kids. Meanwhile, taking on his brother’s six kids as well, and he’s trying to raise his family. So I understand the toughness he was going through.
“And when I say that I still felt rich, it’s because even though he disciplined us to this incredible standard, he never left us.
“He stayed. He never left our sides. He would discipline us and then continue to harbour love and say, ‘I’m sorry I did this.’
“But I look back at that community, which has changed, and think, ‘How many of the families at that time could say that?’
“Could they say that their father stayed around even when it was getting tough? He was still there saying, ‘We’re fine. We’re good. You get to have a piece of bread and some milk, and you still get to go to school’.”
Their dad’s way of coping, says Pene, was he “just sang through all of it”.
“And I think that’s probably why we keep doing it because we’re singing when we’re happy on stage, and also, we would sing if we were sad, because we find the pathway – through singing. That’s why it just happens, so naturally.”
The songs of the father, visited upon the sons.
In many ways, Pene and Amitai’s upbringing, with its entrenched focus on sacrifice for the ensemble rather than the individual, serves them well for the competitive world of opera.
Friday afternoon singing, Saturday sport, Sunday church (“We did not like it,” says Pene. “We tried to stay away from church as much as possible.”)
Science classes and fledgling dreams for the future had not yet taken flight in the classrooms at Aorere College in Papatoetoe.
As a rugby player, Pene is corralled by music teacher Terence Maskell to sing in a production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore. It’s clear Pene is born for the stage.
Amitai will park his health science studies and join the music class. Pene joins the school choir and Maskell teaches both him and Amitai piano.
Pene will later be invited to study at the Wales International Academy of Voice. He returns in 2012 to sing at the New Zealand Opera School where he, Amitai and their cousin Moses Mackay form the pop/opera crossover trio Sol3 Mio that will go on to become one of New Zealand’s highest selling acts ever.
In 2017 after his début in Rigoletto at San Francisco Opera, Pene launches his international operatic career. Amitai moves to Europe in 2022 to pursue his.
Pene’s singing coach says: “An Islander trying to pursue opera? You won’t be able to do it, because you’re Samoan. It’s not in your blood”.
Many say: “If you choose to go down the path of Sol3 Mio, no one will ever take you seriously as an opera singer, and you’ll never be able to crack it in the business”.
Pene, the first Samoan tenor to perform on the world’s greatest opera stages on both sides of the Atlantic, and described as one of the best tenors of his generation, says: “Despite all of the hardship, I believed I could do it”.
As children, life for the Pati brothers was Friday afternoon singing, Saturday sport, Sunday church.
He holds no grudge against that teacher or anyone.
“He wasn’t trying to be mean. I think he was trying to be realistic. And it motivated me.
“My instant reply to him was, ‘Is it because we can’t do it, or no one has done it?’ “And that’s when he said, ‘Ah, well, you know, not many people have done it.’
“And I said, ‘Well then, how do we know if we don’t know?’ Like, how, how do we know it’s not possible? The reason why young kids go play rugby is because they see us playing rugby.
“They see it. But now that they see us covering this ground that they thought we couldn’t do, it’s now opened up the floodgates.
“So for me, hearing these comments, many comments, even from my tutor teachers back in high school, I think they were necessary to hear to become the man I am today.”
Amitai, considered one of the new lyric voices of his generation, studies at Merola Opera Program in San Francisco, and is also a graduate of the Wales International Academy of Voice.
“You know, our parents set us up pretty well for that. We didn’t realise that there was a lot of reverse psychology going on in the house.
“Our dad especially would sort of guide us along the lines of, ‘you know, if someone’s going to tell you to do something that you can’t … prove them wrong’.
“The best way to get back at them is just to do it.”
But self belief only takes you so far. In what Amitai describes as a “cold” world, the demands on opera singers are huge. There is no arrival point. It’s relentlessly competitive.
“I totally agree that the way that we’ve been brought up really does help with how we portray ourselves on stage and give ourselves to the music rather than trying to always think technically. There’s a really good balance between technicality and creativity.
“And when you manage to find that line, everything else just falls into place. The industry can be very cold. That’s the truth of it.
“So to be able to bring your own spin on the music, and to bring your own personality to the music as well, and have people see that while you’re performing on stage, it makes a huge difference. And that’s what people are always looking for.”
Before Sol3Mio took off, no one wanted to fund them being opera singers with Moses, says Pene.
“We said, ‘What if we did it ourselves though?’ Imagine what it would feel like if we funded ourselves and got to the top and said, ‘We did it on our own’.”
The brothers on stage with cousin Moses Mackay as Sol3 Mio.
Sol3Mio went on to win multiple awards and their self-titled debut album is 10x certified Platinum.
“We get to Cardiff, and then they say, ‘Not many people go on to go and sing on these big stages’,” says Pene.
“And I would say, ‘Imagine if we made that stage though. Just imagine it’. I don’t know how long it will take for me to be on that stage, but I can see myself on that stage.”
It’s a fine line, however, between confidence and ego.
“Confidence is having the talent to back it up,” says Pene.
“Ego is going at it alone and thinking you’re the one that makes this work.”
Amitai: “It’s manifesting”.
Pene: “I should do it for the Lotto. Bloody hell”.
Amitai: “I do it a lot of the time. I’m always at home thinking, ‘What if I had a burger in my hand?’.”
Pene: “Uber Eats comes calling. It’s in your hands. Look, you imagined it. It’s now in your hands”.
Crack-ups are plentiful. Comparisons between the brothers, inevitable. At one point in the documentary Pene asks Amitai what it’s like being in second place.
But, jokes aside, their fa‘aaloalo (respect) is solid.
Amitai says: “He’s doing what he loves doing; I’m doing what I love doing. Why do you have to compare us?”.
It is liberating, they say, to perform internationally.
“I think this has been an advantage for us,” says Pene, “that we haven’t been brought up in the system of the operatic or classical arts, because then we come in purely very virgin-minded in the sense that we don’t know what it’s supposed to sound like”.
Timing is everything. The Pati brothers have a foothold in a world undergoing a revolution. There’s more diversity and accessibility; it’s evolving from its exclusive, flamboyantly theatrical origins.
There are many moments in their story that connect meaningfully, viscerally. When Pene debuts at the Met in New York, his parents and family show up, surprising him.
“It was a huge deal for all of us,” says Amitai.
“We all wanted to be there, to support him and make sure that he knew that we were there to see one of the bigger operatic milestones in one singer’s lifetime basically.”
Afterwards, the family travel to London to see Amitai’s debut at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.
“After that,” says Pene, “they said, ‘you know, I think that’s all we can do.’ They are getting old.
“And they also said, ‘We’ve seen you both in two extreme, glorious moments. Now we just support from afar.’ I know that they’re proud of what we’re doing, but it still hurts. It hurts that they’re so far away.”
Director/producer Rebecca Tansley weaves a complex, intimate story that travels around the world but mostly the human heart and it’s the personal connections that hit.
Like Pene and his soprano wife, Amina Edris, who are shown packing and preparing to separate, yet again.
For Amitai and his partner, separation can mean seven, eight months apart.
“We make these little dates work so that when you see each other you make the most of them. It’s nice to know that you’re with somebody who knows the industry and understands how it feels.”
“I find myself thinking,” says Pene, “‘if this is the burden that you have to have, this sense of separation, well it’s a beautiful burden to carry’.”
The mat keeps weaving, you keep adding, and it just keeps going.
Tenor: My Name is Pati is in cinemas on March 5