The Long Way Home is a multimedia fine art series by Emmy-nominated producer, director, and multidisciplinary artist Alisi Styles. Appearing as both artist and subject, Alisi explores her journey as an Indigenous Fijian migrant woman, tracing her search for belonging and identity across the United States. Over 15 years, her life unfolded through more than 30 relocations and travel across over 30 states, including 12 cross-country road trips — movements shaped by work, relationships, and the rhythms of everyday life. At its core, the series is a meditation on finding home: in place, memory, and self.

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In the series, Alisi appears in traditional Fijian regalia across Western urban streets, rural landscapes, and small-town settings. Ordinary gestures of daily Western life — ordering coffee at a café, eating cotton candy at a small-town county fair, walking through grocery aisles, or waiting at a bus stop — are transformed when performed in her regalia, creating a striking contrast between Western routines and Indigenous presence. The imagery confronts and challenges notions of what it means to be a transplant or immigrant in the Western world, making visible the tension, resilience, and ongoing negotiation required of Indigenous people living in displacement. Scenes span frozen tundras of the Midwest to the moss-draped and humid back roads of the Deep South, anchoring the work in both the literal and emotional landscapes of diasporic life.

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The work is realized in collaboration with three masterful photographic artists, each a storyteller in their own right. All three specialize and interchange collaboratively across 35mm and 16mm film, drone, and moving image, blending their distinct visual languages into a layered cinematic and photographic tapestry. Their collaboration allows the series to shift seamlessly between intimate, tactile still moments and expansive, soaring perspectives, reflecting movement, memory, and the search for home.
 

Alisi’s cultural performance is at the heart of the work as an embodied practice of Fijian womanhood. She sings ancestral songs, performs meke — the traditional Fijian dance — and delivers spoken word fluently in three Fijian dialects: the principal Bau dialect, the dialect of her maternal grandfather from the chiefly village of Viseisei, and the dialect of her maternal grandmother from Nadroga. These practices are lived, bodily, and vocal expressions of genealogy, memory, and cultural knowledge. Voice, movement, and image converge into a sensory narrative that reflects the continuity of culture within a contemporary diasporic experience.

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At its heart, The Long Way Home is a deeply significant story about finding 'home' — a concept that evolves through seasons of life and holds different meanings for different people. Production will unfold over 12 months across multiple U.S. locations from late 2026 through 2027, with a planned unveiling in early 2028.