Director
In the 1950s thousands of Pacific Islanders came to Aotearoa to meet a labour shortage. They faced racism, and in the 1970s, notorious dawn raids by police. In 1971 a group of young gang members and students set up the Polynesian Panthers to stand up for the rights of the Pasifika community. They ran food co-ops, homework centres, and lobbied for support services. In this Dan Salmon-directed documentary, presenter Nevak Rogers explores the inspirations, events (Bastion Point, Springbok Tour) and legacy of the movement co-founded by her uncle Will 'llolahia.
Director
Starting in the questioning times of the late 60s, many New Zealanders began leaving town to set up their own communities, in search of alternative ways to live. This then and now documentary travels to communes long gone and still active, and tracks down many of those involved. Tim Shadbolt describes a time when people questioned "everything fearlessly ... without reserve and without restraint". The back to the land approach brought both satisfaction and fatigue.
Director
Oscar Kightley and Nathan Rarere reverse the mind blowing ocean voyage of their distant Pacific ancestors. Following a DNA trail, they travel thousands of miles, and meet people their ancestors would have left behind thousands of years earlier, before arriving on the shores of Taiwan and discovering for themselves the origins of their people.
Director
Pictures of Susan is a 2012 feature documentary by Dan Salmon. The film examines the artist’s upbringing and earliest works, her twenty-year dormant period and the recent resurgence in interest from the art world for her idiosyncratic drawings since resuming in 2008. Auckland ‘outsider artist’ Susan King stopped talking when she was four. Her grandmother recognised the little girl’s talent for drawing and kept her supplied with coloured pencils and paper. For 20 years Susan expressed herself in thousands of artworks filled with playfulness, curiosity and terror. Then one day she suddenly stopped drawing. Her pictures were carefully packed away into boxes, under the bed and in the attic. There were two decades of silence, before she drew again. Today, the dealer world has discovered Susan’s art brut. A series of exhibitions, have garnered international demand for Susan’s art, but leaves an ethical quandary for the family who can only guess at Susan's wishes.
