Otaki’s answer to Sundance
Goes inside the nearly-world-famous showcase of the very best of indigenous filmmaking and film-makers from around the planet.
Is this Aotearoa’s own Sundance? The main street of O¯ taki is not State Highway 1. Nope, the true main street of O¯ taki (called, oddly enough, ‘‘Main Street’’) is a left-turn off the last roundabout heading north.
Head down the road for halfa-kilometre or so and you’ll find yourself in the sort of country town we all, deep down, wish we could claim as our true home.
It’s a brilliant little nook; friendly, funny, idiosyncratic and populated by a group of people who always seem to have just found something to laugh about.
On the summer’s day I visit, I’m an hour early for my appointment with Tainui Stephens, husband of Libby Hakaraia and one-fifth of the formidable collective that drives the Ma¯ oriland Film Festival, so I potter around a couple of O¯ taki’s array of op shops.
A few books I’d been looking for for ages, and one perfect little solid wood coffee table later and I’m sitting in the sunny wee courtyard at the back of what was once Otaki’s beloved Edhouse’s department store.
It’s a cavernous space, being repurposed and renovated around us, as we chat about Libby and Tainui’s vision for the festival; O¯ taki’s nearly-world-famous showcase of the very best of indigenous film-making and filmmakers from around the planet.
Libby explains the origins in the festival programme. ‘‘About 15 years ago, I was working on a television project involving films shot in New Zealand in the early 1900s. One of the films had as its end frame, ‘The town of Otaki, home of Maoriland Films and the Los Angelos (sic) of New Zealand’s Moving Picture Industry’.
‘‘The film was made in O¯ taki nearly 100 years ago, and it featured many of my relatives of Nga¯ ti Raukawa descent. I printed that frame and put it on my fridge. I came to reflect often on the possibility of O¯ taki becoming a film-hub again.’’
The festival launched in 2014. Lacking the money for a billboard on the highway, the team – Libby, Tainui, cousins Pat and Tania and niece Maddy – scraped together the dollars for a tiny, dilapidated caravan. The van was signwritten and used as the festival’s billboard, office and ticket-booth.
The following year, the crew moved into offices in town. In 2016, they decided to lease the thenvacant
"Ma¯ ori film has been widely acclaimed and continues to attract international attention." Libby Hakaraia
Edhouse’s site. And in 2017, a perfect storm of fundraising by the Ma¯ oriland Charitable Trust, hard work and an unstoppable optimism in the future of the festival came together to purchase the building.
This year, the Ma¯ oriland Film Festival rolls out its fifth instalment for a five-day season, from today until Sunday.
The programme showcases 15 feature-length and 86 short films from 11 countries and 65 indigenous nations.
Most of the international content has never screened in New Zealand. Films and film-makers from the First Nations and indigenous peoples of Australia, North America, Norway, Finland, Papua New Guinea, Sweden, Tonga, Panama, Norway and Greenland are represented.
There are thrillers, big-budget spectaculars and family movies, as well as stories that will truly break your heart and put it back together stronger than it was before.
One of them is the astonishing Birkebeinerne – The Last King, from Oscar-nominated Sa´ mi filmmaker Nils Gaup. A historical epic set in civil war-ravaged Norway, its rip-roaring, ski-mounted fight scenes tearing through snow-clad mountains are like nothing you’ve seen before.
There’s also the New Zealand premiere of Larissa Behrendt’s landmark documentary After The Apology, exposing the shocking number of Aboriginal children still being removed from their families in Australia. The rate today is higher than it was during the time of the Stolen Generations, from 1910 to the 70s.
But why a showcase at all? What is it about indigenous and First Nations’ film-making that demands the existence of festivals like Ma¯ oriland and its sister ships around the world?
If we define indigenous as the original people of a country now colonised by others, then the answer is clear. The Ma¯ ori writer and film-maker Barry Barclay (Tangata Whenua, Nga¯ ti) wasn’t the first person say, ‘‘we are one country, but more than one nation’’, but he was the first person to drop it on me. I’ve found it useful ever since.
Aotearoa/New Zealand is a global leader at telling our own tales. The success of films like Waru and Boy are regarded with awe by indigenous film-makers around the world, while the career trajectories of Taika Waititi and others are celebrated by a creative rebel alliance that sprawls from the Arctic Circle to the furthest reaches of South America and Polynesia.
As Hakaraia said last year, ‘‘Over the past 20-plus years, Ma¯ ori film has been widely acclaimed and continues to attract international attention. We’ll see what happens. But for now, with the support of our indigenous filmmaking community worldwide, Ma¯ ori will continue to aim for the stars with their filmmaking!’’
Robert Redford’s Sundance Festival – founded in 1978 to celebrate independent and indigenous American cinema – is surely one of the grandaddies of the movement. Every January, Park City in Utah, a town about the size of O¯ taki, is swollen by 40,000 plus visitors from around the world.
Hakaraia sees no reason the Ma¯ oriland Film Festival shouldn’t be the Southern Hemisphere equivalent. And with visitor numbers jumping from 2500 in 2014 to 12,000 in 2017, there’s every reason to believe the festival has the potential.
Maybe, a 100 years later, that promise of, ‘‘The town of Otaki, home of Ma¯ oriland Films and the Los Angelos (sic) of New Zealand’s Moving Picture Industry’’, might just be an idea whose time has come.