MAORILAND: Last year's Maoriland Film Festival's red carpet event. PHOTO/SUPPLIED
MAORILAND: Last year's Maoriland Film Festival's red carpet event. PHOTO/SUPPLIED
Film-makers from around the world will be arriving in New Zealand this week ahead of the second Maoriland Film Festival.
Modelled on the hugely successful Sundance Film Festival, Maoriland is New Zealand's first International Indigenous film festival and has attracted film-makers from as faraway as Greenland and Siberia. They willjoin indigenous film-makers from Canada, US, Australia and Latin America whose films have also shown in film festivals such as Berlin, Sundance and imagineNATIVE in Canada - the world's largest indigenous film festival.
The festival opens today and being showcased is a selection of Maori films from Te Arawa. In the early 1920s, Australian company Federated Feature Films proposed a New Zealand branch to produce feature films. Otaki was a suggested as a suitable place to establish a studio because of the town's varied scenery and "potent actinic ray" (white light). The New Zealand Moving Picture Company was established.
The Maoriland Film Festival is the first international, indigenous, industry-focused film festival in Aotearoa New Zealand.
This year, film-makers from Canada, US, South America and Europe (including the Sami from Norway and Greenland), Australia and the Pacific join a large number of Maori film-makers and actors to share their films, meet, talk and interact directly with the festival public over five days from March 24-29.
Films will be screened at five truly venues: Raukawa Marae, the Rangiatea Church, Hadfield Hall, the 1940s art deco theatre The Civic, and Te Wananga O Raukawa's Nga Purapura stadium.
With 120 short films, 11 feature films, documentaries, dedicated school screenings, a youth (rangatahi) film-making competition and numerous workshops to select from there will be something for everyone.
