Intricate map of rocky road travelled to Te Papa

A documentary about the creation of our new national museum will be finished today - and will have its world premiere screening tonight. PETER CALDER explains.

Catch it while you have the chance: the newest film in the world.

When Getting to Our Place, the extraordinary documentary about the creation of Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, has its world premiere at the Auckland International Film Festival tonight it will still be warm from the whirr of post-production.

On Monday, as she was doing the last of the captions, the film's producer and co-director Gaylene Preston ruefully compared the rush to Mozart arriving on the conductor's podium, "holding the score with the ink still wet as the orchestra sits waiting patiently."

But for Preston, the maker of Ruby and Rata, Bread and Roses and War Stories and co-director Anna Cottrell, a former television journalist, a last-minute rush was probably inevitable; time, after all, was an important part of the creative process.

Over almost three years, from 1996 to 1998, the film-makers shot 600 hours of videotape, in and around Te Papa. Almost all of the footage was of the meetings where the concepts were hammered out for the displays that would fill the hulking building on the Wellington waterfront.

A film full of meetings may sound like a cure for insomnia, but the 75-minute documentary is riveting.

Most simply, it is a fascinating look behind the scenes of a historic project which, as creative and commercial intelligences collide, has many of the hallmarks of a thriller.

But in rehearsing most if not all of the elements of our problematic national discourse, the film is also an intricate road-map of New Zealand in the last years of the 20th century. Sir Ron Trotter hectoringly lectures the museum's kaihautu and marae designer Cliff Whiting on the meaning of biculturalism and the gap that separates Maori and Pakeha yawns before us; Te Papa's chief executive, Dame Cheryll Sotheran, fumes at length about a bureaucrat's "sneaky little papers" which undermine the museum's case for more funding, and the triangulation between Government, commerce and creativity looks as uneasy as ever.

So revealing are some sequences that we hold our breath waiting for the order to turn the cameras off. But it never comes. Preston explains that she was never aware of having to talk anyone into the idea. Her only undertakings were that the footage would remain confidential - that it wouldn't be leaked to the news - and that the major players would get a chance to see the final cut.

That did not mean surrendering a right of veto, explains Preston.

"I approached this the way I approach any documentary. I showed the women in War Stories all their stories before it was finished because people always tell you really interesting things that inform your cut."

Watching Getting to Our Place, we begin to get a sense of why Te Papa has turned out the way it has. And the time lag, which allows us the luxury of a long view, is quite deliberate.

"We waited a year before even starting to cut it," Preston explains. "We didn't race in and cut it the minute Te Papa opened. I felt I needed some time for everything to have floated downstream to be able to think about it clearly."

* Getting to Our Place screens tonight at 6.15 and on Saturday at 10.15 am at the Auckland International Film Festival.