If you can talk about an ocean having crossroads, then Fiji stands at the ‘crossroads’ of the Pacific, with links to both Australasia and South East Asia, and is home to a multi-ethnic community in which Chinese and Hindi are spoken along with Fijian and English (the latter the language of day-to-day business).

The very essence of the kind of tropical paradise Rogers and Hammerstein wrote about in South Pacific (the islands recently provided locations for the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away), Fiji combines the perfect vacation environment with all the services and business infrastructure necessary to establish it firmly on the conference circuit.

And now, following the passing of a slew of new legislative measures, the setting up of the Fiji Audiovisual Commission (FAVC) and the announcement of plans to build a ‘Studio City’ alongside the University of the South Pacific at Yaqara, the island republic is bidding for a place on the world film-making map as well.

Long positioned to take advantage of the increasing globalisation of the world economy and the readiness of multinational companies to run part of their operations from a tax-friendly environment with an attractive climate, Fiji has recently identified the audio-visual industries - a concept given an intentionally loose definition in recent legislation so as to embrace everything from feature films to website design - as a major growth area.