Zealand Film Research Articles

The impacts of ethnic and mainstream culture on Māori-themed films

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the impact of Hollywood crime-thrillers and that of Māori cultural conventions in Māori-themed New Zealand films. The influence of the former is detected in the figure of the gang member, whilst that of the latter in Taiaiake Alfred’s New Warrior, who uses social skills and mental rather than physical strength to fight for the wellbeing of the community. By analysing the portrayals of such characters, we detect how they negotiate the conventions of art films, or ethnically involved ‘Fourth Cinema,’ and those of popular entertainment. We come to the conclusion that although certain gang-related images in these productions are gory, romanticized or Hollywoodized, the representation of contemporary Māori warriors still displays, to a greater or lesser degree, social issues related to modern leadership and the wellbeing of Māori tribes.

Sino-Foreign Co-Production in the Post-Pandemic Era: Effects of Policies on Facilitating Film Co-Production

At this symposium, I will present my research findings which explore the implications of film co-production policies for practitioners engaged in Sino-foreign co-production projects. The research is guided by the theoretical framework of Richard Peterson's production of culture perspective (2004) and John Thornton Caldwell's production culture (2008). Specifically, my presentation will concentrate on film policies and relevant industry documents that have direct relevance to film practitioners in the Australasian region. The dynamics of government relationships are likely to exert an influence on policy-making processes. New Zealand was the first Oceanic country to sign the Memorandum of Agreement with China on the Maritime Silk Road in early 2017. Since then, it has brought opportunities and challenges for New Zealand film industry practitioners. Six official co-production projects with China have been approved since 2019 (New Zealand Film Commission, 2023). For New Zealand film industry practitioners keen to collaborate with their Chinese counterparts in the post-pandemic era, the Belt and Road Initiative presents an opportunity to seize the advantages of the current times. Therefore, filmmakers in both countries should understand the impact of these policies on the Chinese film industry and Sino-foreign co-productions. This qualitative research collected primary data from semi-structured interviews with film practitioners from New Zealand, Australia, and China, and secondary data from documents, government policies, and reports, as well as publically available online industry interviews. A thematic analysis is conducted to examine the data and answering and exploring one of PhD research questions: what would industry policies and documents mean for film practitioners working in co-productions. My research finding shows, through acquiring comprehensive knowledge, film industry practitioners can make informed choices and select collaboration methods that align with the needs of their projects, thus avoiding unnecessary complications or challenges.

‘Te Taonga – a significant contribution to the Māori screen industry’: Profiling Desray Armstrong, contemporary New Zealand film producer

Desray Armstrong is one of the most prolific producers working in the Aotearoa New Zealand screen industry. As a wahine (woman/female) Māori, Armstrong's presence counters the traditional domination of white male screen professionals, yet her aim is to support writers and directors from all backgrounds who have a story to tell. Beginning as a production manager, she worked her way up over a career spanning twenty years, and in December 2021 the New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC) awarded her the Māori Screen Excellence Award. However, Armstrong gained her first producer credit only after employing a non-traditional financing model for the artistically ambitious Stray, which was considered outside the remit of the more commercially minded NZFC. Since Stray, and with the support of the NZFC, she has produced films that are challenging and topical, including the noir thriller Coming Home in the Dark, the family saga Juniper and the social media satire Millie Lies Low. This article demonstrates how the onerous public film funding model in New Zealand and the wider market can affect the ability of filmmakers to tell stories that sit outside the narratives acceptable to New Zealand's pākehā-dominated culture. It exposes the mismatch between Armstrong's view that her work is seen by some, as pākehā focussed and the NZFC's idea of the ‘Māori screen industry’. It concludes that despite the drive toward a more accessible industry, led by the NZFC, filmmakers like Armstrong challenge traditional views about how New Zealand should be represented on screen, choosing to position the story and the storyteller as the chief focus, and not where the story originates from.

Aotearoa New Zealand Film: White Lies

White Lies (Rotberg, 2013) is an Aotearoa New Zealand film, which was adapted to screen from a novella written by Witi Ihimaera (Ihimaera, 2013). My review discusses the film storyline, whilst highlighting social and cultural conflict between the Indigenous Māori population and New Zealand European settlers. Directed by Mexican filmmaker Dana Rotberg, the film addresses colonial oppression in Aotearoa during the early twentieth century by focusing on three women facing their own struggles in coming to terms with their cultural identity.My understanding of indigeneity is grounded in the lived experience of growing up within te ao Māori, the Māori world. On the social and cultural context of creating a Māori-centred perspective, Māori environmental researchers Garth R. Harmsworth and Shaun Awatere offered an explanation. The authors saw that Indigenous culture refers to peoples whom over a long period of time have developed enduring, holistic, ancestral connections to their environments and natural surroundings.

NZFC’s Diversity and Inclusion Strategy

In 2022 the New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC) published its first fully comprehensive diversity and inclusion strategy, He Ara Whakaurunga Kanorau. The ambitious strategy aspired to draw together the existing framework of individually focused diversity funds, including those for Māori and women filmmakers, with an overarching set of policy intentions that aimed to position filmmakers from underrepresented groups at the forefront of the agency’s funding strategy. This article looks at how the NZFC aims to normalise its work in the diversity space through the creation of targeted funding strategies, and how the agency’s idealism, most notable in the breadth of the Diversity and Inclusion strategy and its sometimes nebulous content, can clash with the work of individual filmmakers, many of whom produce films that do not assimilate with the artificial framework. However, institutional intervention in the film industry undoubtedly plays a significant part in creating a vibrant national cinema for Aotearoa New Zealand that gives voice to many filmmakers who might have otherwise not been heard.

The Vampire as a Model of Cultural Otherness in the Television Series “What We Do in the Shadows”

Vampires in popular culture differ from vampires in Serbian traditional culture not only in that they feed on human blood, but also in the implications of otherness they represent. While the Serbian vampire is an example of ontological otherness – a revenant, a non-human as opposed to a human, but not of sociocultural otherness, being a member of the same community as those against whom its misdeeds are directed – the vampire in popular culture is an example of the way that sociocultural otherness derives from ontological otherness. Its non-human nature is clearly designated as the essential difference between it and man in the physical and psychological sense: besides being undead and being at the top of the food chain, its body possesses animal and protean characteristics, and uses various parapsychological powers. As such, it represents an alien in the human world generally, but also alienness with regard to the sociocultural environments in which different works of fiction and films, i.e. works of popular culture, situate it. This alienness is depicted in different ways, all of which can basically be traced to Bram Stoker's shaping of Dracula. In the US TV series What We Do in the Shadows, which is based on the eponymous New Zealand film and takes the form of the sitcom and mockumentary, we follow the lives of three bloodthirsty vampires from Europe and Asia who live together in Staten Island, New York City, in a house they share with a local energy vampire. Their appearance, behavior, habits, speech, etc. are an attribute of their alienness in the New World – and a source of constant misunderstandings with the environment into which they wish to integrate. Although their neighbors cannot know they are not human, they treat them as such, with all the courtesy of middle-class society and political correctness: the obstacle to the vampires' integration into contemporary US society is not their non-humanness, but rather their cultural incompetence. Hence it turns out that the contemporary cultural thought behind the cultural concepts of ontology and otherness is a form of Leachian perception of the manner of primary identification in the majority of traditional cultures in the world, in which "foreigners are in fact not counted among human beings".

Sweet Suburbia and the Bustling City

This paper focuses on the representation of Wellington in New Zealand tourism films in the decades preceding the establishment of the National Film Unit (NFU) in 1941. While critically engaging with current discourses about early New Zealand film production, New Zealand film history, New Zealand human geography and the cinematic city, it performs the textual analysis of eight case studies also examining archival materials related to their production, circulation and reception. This article aims to demonstrate how the cinematic depiction of New Zealand’s capital city in the analysed time frame was a complex and multi-layered process driven and characterised by the coexistence and intertwining of tourism marketing, national publicity and colonial agenda.

Manufacturing urban identities: The emergence of Auckland’s and Wellington’s ‘character’ in New Zealand tourism film

Since its inception, New Zealand film production has often been characterized by a strong focus on the promotion and marketing of local scenic locations. However, over the last few decades and simultaneously with New Zealand’s rapidly increasing urbanization rates, urban narratives have gained prominence in the cinematic representation of the country, gradually becoming important aspects of national tourism marketing campaigns. This article first provides an overview of New Zealand tourism film’s dynamics of production and recurring themes and narratives from the early twentieth century to the 1960s. It then focuses on Toehold on a Harbour and This Auckland – tourism films produced by the government-led New Zealand National Film Unit and released respectively in 1967 and 1966 – and identifies a turning point in the manufacturing of local urban narratives and in New Zealand urban tourism marketing. My critical and textual analysis of these two case studies notably relies on the examination of archival documents related to their production and on an interview with This Auckland’s director Hugh Macdonald. It ultimately shows how the emergence of ‘cities with a character’ as a tourism marketing tool was in fact a carefully planned, articulated and years-long government-driven strategy.

Antipodean urban dystopias: documenting the New Zealand city 1965–1971

ABSTRACT By relying on the textual analysis and on the examination of existing archival documents related to their production and circulation, this article analyses three documentaries produced in New Zealand in the 1965–1971 time frame while providing an overview of New Zealand film history as well as the examination of pre-existing modes of urban representation in New Zealand cinema. The author argues that these three case studies, Wellington in the 1960s: The Way it Seemed, To Live in the City and Notes on A New Zealand City stand at the intersection of both local and global cinematic, social and cultural phenomena, displaying the emergence of a new stylistic and ideological perspective on the New Zealand cinematic city. Such dystopic take is a reflection of both deep social and cultural transformations in New Zealand society and global cinematic phenomena.

A subtitling stalemate

Abstract The Dark Horse (2014) is a highly successful New Zealand film that exemplifies a strong multilingual and multicultural landscape where the Māori language and cultural concepts, as well as specific examples of New Zealand English co-exist within the one film. This linguistic and cultural complexity is a key part to the film, therefore retaining this in a translation becomes a challenging responsibility for the subtitler. This article first introduces the restrictions and intricacies of subtitling in general, and then analyses specific scenes from the commercial Italian subtitled version of The Dark Horse, highlighting the translation choices made by the subtitler when confronted with challenges pertaining to scenes involving multilingualism (in the form of English and Māori), culturally specific terminology (the use of New Zealand English idioms), as well as the representation of register for children from low socio-economic backgrounds. Alternative subtitles are proposed that seek to better represent the richness of the source text’s language and cultural references.

‘Selling the creative city’: Wellington tourism film in the neoliberal era

ABSTRACTSince the beginning of the Twentieth Century tourism films have constituted a significant part of New Zealand film production. In fact, films made and/or used for tourism promotion have been released for domestic and overseas circulation by both government-led and private film production companies. Over the last 10 years the institutions in charge of Wellington tourism marketing have been increasingly relying on social media platforms such as Youtube and Facebook to globally circulate images of New Zealand’s capital city. Indeed, since 2007, 20 tourism marketing campaigns conceived for social media circulation featured in WellingtonNZ Youtube channel. This article will focus on three of these campaigns: the Vampire’s Guide to Vellington (2014); the It’s Never Just a Weekend When It’s in Wellington series (2014) and the LookSee series (2017). Through the analysis of these case studies, this article argues that contemporary Wellington tourism film production is a complex and multilayered process characterised by the cross-collaboration between local political stakeholders, local creatives and local businesses. Moreover, it highlights how the representation of Wellington as a cinematic and creative city, home of a globalised creative class has been informed by the neoliberal paradigm and by the persistence of a deeply-rooted settler gaze.

Reframing early Australasian cinema: Trans-Tasman exchanges during the silent film period

The histories of New Zealand and Australian film production, distribution and exhibition have been characterized by significant exchanges in terms of culture, technology, creative personnel and policy approaches. Despite forming a persistent characteristic of the film industries of both countries, these connections have so far been either ignored or under-examined. This article investigates the technological, industrial, economic and cultural factors that influenced the relationship between Australian and New Zealand filmmaking during the early period of cinema until the 1930s. During this period, film production and distribution in New Zealand and Australia was conceived as an Australasian initiative characterized by both extensive labour mobility and an integrated film market. Early Australasian filmmakers moved seamlessly across the Tasman, producing films both in Australia and in New Zealand and contributing to both national cinematic traditions. This article argues that to fully grasp the histories of Australian and New Zealand film, it is essential to consider the contribution that these Australasian filmmakers made to the cultural, technological and industrial development of both national cinemas.

Contested terrains of identity and home: Coming of age, belonging and Māori-Pākehā relations in Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016)

Māori director Taika Waititi has garnered international acclaim for his films, from the early shorts Two Cars, One Night (2004) and Tama Tū - (2005) to his featurelength box office successes Boy (2010) and Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016). While he may now be better known to global audiences for recently directing the 2017 instalment of the Marvel Comics franchise Thor: Ragnarok, in a number of his fictional New Zealand films Waititi offers fresh and original perspectives on modern Māori identity and experience. In Boy and Hunt for the Wilderpeople he explores Māori identity in relation to the classic theme of coming of age. This article discusses Hunt for the Wilderpeople as a coming-of-age tale depicting a Māori boy’s journey through the contested terrains of identity and home. Loosely adapted from Barry Crump’s 1986 novel Wild Pork and Watercress, the film focuses on the unlikely relationship between a rebellious, 13-year-old Māori foster boy, Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison), and his reluctant foster parent, Hector ‘Hec’ Faulkner (Sam Neill), a bushman and ex-con, who together escape into the wilderness to evade confinement by child welfare authorities and capture by the police. Working in his trademark comedic and satirical style, Waititi contemporizes Crump’s original story by introducing new characters, unexpected plot developments and a rich array of satirical allusions to global media culture that significantly transform the novel’s celebration of male hunting rituals and iconic image of bicultural Aotearoa New Zealand. Instead, Waititi depicts ongoing tensions between Pākehā and Māori, while subverting and demythologizing clichéd notions of national and ethnic identity.

The Dub Encounter in New Zealand Film

Peter Wells takes ‘dubbing’ as a metaphor to describe the cultural and cinematic experience of projecting ‘our thoughts, desires and dreams … into other peoples’ accents’ (2005, 25). Only when ‘the element of dubbing is removed from our speech on film’ will New Zealand cinema find its own voice. I use the idea of dubbing to advance a theoretical reading of New Zealand film that undoes the binary between local and global. I explore this unheimlich quality in reference to the films of John O’Shea, Barry Barclay and Florian Habicht. I examine the rupture that these directors introduce between voice and image in order to discover a poetics of identity that is attuned to a disjunct experience of place, time and history beyond the limits of national cinema.

Ever the Land: A People, A Place, Their Building

Reviewed by: Ever the Land: A People, A Place, Their Building David Lipset Ever the Land: A People, A Place, Their Building. Documentary, 93 minutes, dcp or Blu-ray, color, 2015. Written and directed by Sarah Grohnert; produced by Alexander Behse. Distributed by Monsoon Pictures International and the New Zealand Film Commission. See http://evertheland.com/ for prices and availability. Ever the Land: A People, A Place, Their Building celebrates the Tūhoetribe, the Māori people who live in a heavily forested corner of the North Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand. The Tūhoe filed compensation claims with the Waitangi Commission in 2007 and subsequently decided to allocate nz$15 million for the construction of a large tribal center at the valley entrance of their contested, tragic land. Designed by Ivan Mercep, the center was meant to adhere with the Living Building Challenge, whose stringent standards of sustainability require careful attention to material sourcing and a great deal of compliance documentation. Called Te Uru Tamatua, it was to be the first such building in Aotearoa. In a visually compelling way, Ever the Land tracks the building process by embedding it in the context of the dialogue surrounding it. That dialogue, on which the filmmaker unobtrusively dotes, tells a thought-provoking story. Through voices and actions, we learn of the contested relationship between Tūhoe green ideology and tribal solidarity. This view is asserted in lovely scenes in which children are put to bed by mothers with stories about ancestor-spirits who hate trash, [End Page 197] bricks are handmade for the new building, and, in shots interspersed throughout the narrative, fog rises over thick forests that cover their mountainsides. But some Tūhoe voices complain. It is to the great credit of the young director, Sarah Grohnert, that scenes are included in which men rather forcibly object to money being allocated for a tribal purpose rather than to help buy individuals houses to live in. The Tūhoe are poor, the movie makes clear, and live day to day in subsistence pursuits, sending children to school as best they can. The implication would be that, for dissenters, the tribal center is nothing but a vain extravagance. Use is also made of voiceovers from the radio announcing the project, the death of the building’s architect, and the pending settlement from the New Zealand government. The latter agreement is indeed signed in 2013 in Parliament. The tribe is compensated and receives more control over the Urewera National Park on its land. The state apologizes for a past of violence, indignities, and land theft. Brick by brick, board by board, solar panel by solar panel, Tūhoe and Pākehā laborers and managers erect the building. Images of the fog, the forest, trucks dumping cement, rooms stuffed with scaffolding, and so forth appear like a kind of call-and-response chorus throughout the movie. Meanwhile, impromptu meetings of orange-vested men and women in hard hats take place on the job site. Building products imported from Europe are banned, as are red-list chemicals. In more formal settings, Tūhoe discuss the pending settlement with the Crown and are kept in the loop about the roject. Will it be earthquake proof? How will it contribute to a sustainable future for the tribe? The movie more or less culminates with the opening ceremony for the building. An intense haka (ritual dance) is performed, after which a large throng of onlookers make their way across a parking lot. A couple of children cut a braided ribbon made of leaves and enter the edifice for a first look at its cavernous rooms, display cases for artifacts of tribal history, and recycling bins. The narrative begins and ends with a scene of the same rural setting, as if to suggest that the new building has not had any demonstrative impact on the relatively remote and basic quality of life of the Tūhoe. At first, we see through a window, perhaps of a car in which the filmmakers arrive, a somewhat distant image of a modest home at the foot of a forested mountainside. A grassy field that is fenced in several ways, perhaps as...

Listening harder: Queer archive and biography

This article emerges from a wider study on bicultural film archiving practice. It focuses on Jonathan Dennis as a subject of (my) archiving, and as a distinctive archivist himself in relation to a specific archive at a particular moment. Dennis practice differed significantly from North American and European conventions contemporaneous with his life work. The charismatic founding director of Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision (formerly The New Zealand Film Archive) Jonathan Dennis (1953–2002) became a conduit for tensions and debates during the 1981–2002 period in relation to indigenous and non indigenous presentation of (film) archival materials. This resulted in a film archive and curatorship practice which differed significantly from that of the North American and European archives he originally sought to emulate. As a Pākehā (non Māori/indigenous New Zealander) with a strong sense of social justice he argued for an awareness of geographical location and cultural context in his work. He supported a philosophical shift in archival practice, by engaging indigenous peoples in developing creative and innovative exhibitions and programmes from the 1980s period until his death.Note: From 1988 the official name for the New Zealand Film Archive was Ngā Kaitiaki o ngā Taonga Whitiāhua (Guardians of the Treasured Images of Light). Since August 2014 the institution is called Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, New Zealand Archive of Film, Television and Sound Ngā Taonga Whitiāhua Me Ngā Taonga Kōrero to acknowledge the acquisition of the state-owned Television NZ Archive and Sound Archives from Radio NZ. For brevity’s sake the Archive is referred to throughout as NTSV (Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision).Key: NTSV PP JD refers to the NTSV Personal Papers of Jonathan Dennis (uncatalogued at time of writing).

NZ film on demand: searching for national cinema online

This article examines how the concept of New Zealand cinema is both constructed and complicated by video on demand (VOD) websites available in New Zealand. New Zealand cinema is markedly transnational in its economic organization and cultural constitution. Nevertheless, the concept of the nation continues to play an important role in the operations of the New Zealand Film Commission. This article considers how VOD sites available within New Zealand contribute to this set of relations, examining the degree to which the organization of these sites’ catalogues emphasize films’ national and/or transnational characteristics. This has implications for the importance that audiences may attach to New Zealand as a way of understanding cinema and themselves. It also has implications for the visibility of films that explore the national-cultural specificities of New Zealand. This article will consequently gauge the effects of any such emphasis upon, or elision of, the nation as a way of categorizing cinema, while also contextualizing this in relation to the power relations (between industries and cultures) constituted through VOD distribution.

The systems psychodynamics of gendered hiring: Personal anxieties and defensive organizational practices within the New Zealand film industry

This article uses systems psychodynamic concepts to explore the creation and reproduction of gendered inequality within the New Zealand film industry. The article focuses on the ways in which senior film production workers’ anxieties about hiring, or working with, women influence the process of assembling project teams. It suggests that the process of choosing team members creates considerable anxiety for both senior film production workers with responsibility for hiring and lower-status team members who need to rely on them to create high-functioning teams. The industry ideal of the autonomous creative worker is implicitly gendered, conforming more closely to traditional concepts of the unencumbered male worker than traditional ideals of femininity and motherhood. The antithesis between these representations creates anxiety, raising unconscious fears that women as a category are less trustworthy workers. Consequently, discriminatory hiring practices that diminish these anxieties become collectively accepted as rational responses to organizational problems and embedded within the social system as collectively endorsed defences against anxiety. Given that project-based employment is temporary, this pattern of discrimination against women is regularly repeated and contributes to entrenched gender inequality within the film industry. Qualitative data from interviews with 12 male and 13 female film production workers is presented to illustrate this analysis.

Navigating Movie (M)apps: Film Locations, Tourism and Digital Mapping Tools

Navigating Movie (M)apps: Film Locations, Tourism and Digital Mapping Tools

Interstitial and collective filmmaking in New Zealand: the case of Asian New Zealand film

There has been an emerging group of filmmakers of Asian descent whose films instantiate diasporic filmmaking in the New Zealand context. In the Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New Zealand 2 (2015), this nascent body of films has been conceptualised as ‘Asian New Zealand film’ as their diegeses are primarily based on various aspects of diasporic experience and life in New Zealand. This article examines the modes of production of this group of films within the context of the New Zealand film industry and society, and explores some of this work as examples of the interstitial and collective modes of production that for noted scholar Hamid Naficy demarcate diasporic filmmaking – or what he terms as ‘accented cinema’. Asian New Zealand films both do and do not fit interstitial and collective filmmaking, as they have been made within a variation of modes of production and distribution conditioned by the social, cultural, historical and national regimes that regulate the processes of cultural production in New Zealand. Examining the forces that regulate production and distribution of these films offers us new ways of thinking about the effects of the underlying relationships that can be developed to facilitate diasporic filmmaking as a potential benefit to the economy and also a way to respond to cultural diversity in New Zealand.