New Zealand Film Commission (Firm)

Making Utuexplores the kaupapa behind the production. It includes interviews with Joe Malcolm, cultural advisor on the production, and Murphy,Merata Mitaand actorMartyn Sandersonshare their understanding of the story's exploration of New Zealand's racial past.

An aged woman lives with her fully grown and wholly dependent son. This film is a rare view of an enclosed world where an 82-year-old woman, alone, is 'The Burdened One'. Filmed over a period of one and a half years, this emerges as a haunting and powerful portrayal of their life together, a life of ritual and of their survival.

Vigil is the first ever film from New Zealand to compete in Cannes (1984). Winner of the Best Film award at the Madrid Film Festival it is the first feature film of 30 year-old Vincent Ward. Vigil is a powerful atmospheric drama set in a primeval valley where four characters live and farm in an uneasy coexistence. The story unfolds through the eyes of the central character Toss, an 11 year-old girl caught up in the tragedy of her father's death and...

This Roger Donaldson documentary preceded the director's work on The World's Fastest Indian and fuelled his interest in Burt Munro whose motto was 'fix it and try again'. In 50 years, he had some 250 motor blow-ups, usually because the con-rods or cylinder sleeves couldn't take the pace...With basic equipment and astonishing ingenuity, he would rebuild the engine ready for the next try. He made cylinder linings out of cast-iron drain pipes and fabricated...

A woman walks between the worlds of the living and the dead in search of her lost children. Vincent Ward weaves drama with documentary to unravel the extraordinary story of Puhi, the Tuhoe woman he filmed in 1978 for his early film In Spring One Plants Alone. He attempts to unravel the mystery that has haunted him for 30 years: Who was Puhi?

Mauriis the story of Rewi, a manhaunted by a past which threatens to engulf his future.The story is set among the colourful characters of a once thriving settlement, Te Mata, upon whom the encroachment by Europeans spells disaster. Now isolated by lack of numbers, time and distance, the remaining survivors form a tight-knit community which outsiders find impenetrable. Rewi's deceit forces him to become part of that community and his life is inextricably...

In a remote seaside village, a stranger becomes involved in public and personal crises.

Infatuation and manipulation enter the lives of an adolescent and her father because of the arrival of a reckless femme fatale. A piercing modern fable entwining the lives of an awkward adolescent girl, a malevolent femme fatale, a wheelchair-ridden critic and a once successful novelist, Crush inhabits an unspoilt landscape - Eden before the fall. That is, until a car crash blazes a destructive trail through the lives of the three women and one man....