Eye for hidden worlds in places overlooked

Barry Barclay's doco is about the Kaipara Harbour, a jewel, he says we're going to lose if we're not careful. File Picture / NZ Herald

When Barry Barclay was named an Arts Foundation laureate last Christmas, the honour came with a cheque for $50,000. The first thing he spent the money on was a video projector to show his latest film to the people whose story it tells.

That film was The Kaipara Affair and Barclay cracks a self-deprecating joke about how his projection equipment brought "the cinema experience" to the community halls at Tinopai and Kaiwaka.

But he was bringing something else as well, returning the piece he had made to the land it had sprung from.

"I was saying: 'It's your film'," the film-maker explains. "'I know it's our copyright but it's for you to use, to show in a hall over at Thames or Raglan'."

The words may sound like a symbolic gesture but they are intensely and sincerely meant. Barclay - indisputably our greatest documentary-maker - has never lost sight of the fact that he is the teller of others' stories and The Kaipara Affair, like all his films, brings an important but untold and quintessentially New Zealand story into the light.

"It's part of a grand documentary tradition, I suppose," he says. "Remember, documentary preceded drama in the history of cinema. And the best ones take the camera somewhere it hasn't been before - even if that place is right under your nose - and bring out the world that is hidden.

"In this case it's a very urgent issue - we're going to lose a jewel if we're not careful - but it's also a story that isn't being told right now, the story of two communities, Maori and non-Maori. And they actually work together much better than we might think from listening to [Don Brash's] Orewa speech. They work like brothers or like cousins. The wananga-bashing sort of speech is what dominates the landscape but it tends to obscure what the country's about."

Barclay's career is now well into its fourth decade and his has been a small but strong voice in New Zealand screen storytelling.

In collaboration with a young historian by the name of Michael King, he made the Tangata Whenua series in 1974, television's first serious examination of the Maori world.

His debut feature, Ngati (1987), the first by a Maori director, was the main event on Maori Television's first night and is among the best local features. The Neglected Miracle (1985) is an extraordinarily prescient film about the ownership of genetic resources which is, if anything, more relevant in the age of Roundup-ready canola than it was when it was made. The Feathers of Peace (2000), again based on King's work, laid to rest the persistent myths about the origins and fate of the Moriori.

Yet always Barclay uses the specifics of his story to say something larger. The Neglected Miracle, he once wrote, is about "the dignity of sovereignty" and the Kaipara film is a film about the reality of life in a small community where life-and-death decisions are made by unseen people in distant offices.

"Others have tried to make a film about what's going on there but they have only shown the confrontation. I guess I was trying for a different story to pay tribute to the people themselves, the locals and show what it's like being in a struggle like that.

"I'm not a great believer in the idea that you do a great splash on TV and the world changes. It might take 30 years but it's important that the people see that it is happening."

The Kaipara Affair screens in the Auckland International Film Festival tomorrow at 1pm and on Tuesday at 10.30am at the Sky City Theatre.