By PETER CALDER
Feature-length documentary films can be box-office poison so it's a credit to exhibitors that Barry Barclay's The Feathers of Peace had a short theatrical season - even though it took barely $70,000 - after its well-received showing in last year's film festival.
It recognised the film's importance not just as a cultural artefact but as the most assured and impressive local production released last year.
Tonight - having been postponed in favour of a review of the musical life of the terminally ill Dudley Moore a few weeks back - Feathers gets the wide audience it deserves, leading off a five-week run of documentaries on TV One.
Barclay's 30-year career has produced some remarkable and memorable films about the way Maori and Pakeha brush up against each other (1987's lyrical Ngati remains one of my top-10 local films) and he is no stranger to documentary, having made the Tangata Whenua series in the 1970s.
In telling the widely misunderstood story of the Moriori, he treads in distinguished footsteps, notably those of the late Bill Saunders, the pioneer documentary maker who visited the subject in 1980 and 1988, and of author Michael King, on whose Moriori: A People Rediscovered Barclay's film heavily relies.
The Feathers of Peace employs the quasi-newsreel format pioneered in Peter Watkins' Culloden in the 1960s, "interviewing" actors (though all its spoken words are taken from the contemporary record) and interrogating the past to illuminate the present.
Beginning with the first European landfall in 1791 (the brig Chatham gave the islands their English name though the indigenous Moriori named them Rekohu), it takes us through the 1835 invasion of rapacious Taranaki Maori - Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama - and the systematic genocide they visited on the natives, and culminates in the 1870 Land Court decisions which gave more than 97 per cent of the islands to the invaders.
Along the way, and almost incidentally, it disposes of the reactionary fiction that Maori displaced Moriori from mainland Aotearoa and, therefore, have no claim on this land.
The film takes its title from the islanders' resolute pacifism, which, in the end, cost so many of them their lives.
By ancient edict, warfare was banned, so the Moriori did not resist as they were enslaved, killed and, in may cases, eaten.
The last full-blooded Moriori, Tame Horomona Rehe, or Tommy Solomon, died in 1933.
Barclay's film caps something of a cultural renaissance for Moriori in the 1990s. Film-makers and author have recalled a story which, as Barclay observes, has been "not just forgotten, but actively perverted and buried, like burying the Holocaust."
Maui Solomon, a Wellington Moriori lawyer who is leading his people's campaign to be accorded status as an iwi under the Treaty of Waitangi, had teachers at school "telling me that we were a myth and didn't exist."
The Feathers of Peace - which won the television section of last year's Media Peace Awards - may not be the first to tell its story, but it is an important step in setting aside that myth.
The "New Zealand festival" of documentaries will include, in succeeding weeks, films about the links between food and identity in multicultural Auckland; actor, musician and wild man Bruno Lawrence; New Zealanders seeking spiritual enlightenment in India; and the change that the 20th century wrought on the meaning and value of virginity.
The Feathers of Peace, TV One, 8.30 pm
TV: Myths of Moriori being cast aside
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