Mungau Dain

Mungau Dain (1994 – 5 January 2019) was a ni-Vanuatu actor and villager who starred in the 2015 Australian-Vanuatuan film, Tanna. Dain, who had never acted before, was cast in the film alongside Marie Wawa, another Yakel villager, and other local untrained actors. Tanna, which is based on the true story of a ni-Vanuatu couple in 1987 who committed suicide after their tribes refused to allow them to marry, won the Audience Award Pietro Barzisa at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival in 2015 and was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film at the 89th Academy Awards in 2017. Dain, who reportedly had never seen a movie before his casting, traveled internationally in support of the film, including to Australia, Los Angeles and Venice. Dain was born in 1994 in the small village of Yakel on Tanna island, Tafea Province. The village, which had no electricity, is home to approximately 200 residents. Yakel, which is part of a sharing economy network consisting of several other Tanna villages, utilizes goods such as pigs, yams, and taro as its form of currency. According to Terry Adlington, the managing director of the Tanna Coffee Development Company, which works with Yakel residents, Dain was "a key participant in the everyday life of his village and the community at large."