The Community Whanau Day is the opening event to the long-awaited festival, bringing contributions from local schools, cultural groups and entertainers this month.
This year the Wānaka Festival of Colour is bringing food, dance, music and storytelling from all over the world.
Cultural performers include Queenstown’s Wasabi choir, the Qampi Filipino Cultural Dance Group and Capoeira Central Otago, who will be presenting Brazilian martial arts and music.
To complement the cultural talent, a range of stalls will be serving Argentinian, Brazilian, Filipino, Japanese and Mexican food.
As both Wānaka and Queenstown grow more diverse, cultural representation holds more importance to the community.
Festival artistic director Sophie Kelly said the Community Whānau Day was a special opportunity to bring the whole whānau together to celebrate the growing, changing, and diverse community.
The groups performing at the festival also felt it was an opportunity to share their culture with the wider community while also making newcomers of the same background feel more at home.
Queenstown’s Filipino community president Malou Santos said how important it was to have opportunities for performances as their community continued to grow.
"We are able to let other communities know that we do this in our country, so bringing that here in Queenstown and Wānaka," she said.
In 20 years the Filipino population had gone from less than 100 people to about 3000, making it even more important to represent their culture at events, she said.
Wasabi Japanese choir head Meg Hirata had a similar goal of sharing a treasured part of Japanese culture through music within their community.
She said the group started 10 years ago to "pass on our cultural songs to our kids who never knew some Japanese rhymes that we grew up with."
The group has grown and even caught the interest of non-Japanese speakers who were interested in learning more about them.
They are set to perform four songs at the festival, with one being in English and some being translated into Japanese, including a song by the band Coldplay.
The whanau day will be held from 10am-4pm on March 29 at the Dinosaur park and stage in Wānaka.
