A number of Māori and Pacific films are heading to the Berlin International Film Festival this year to screen in a newly-created category celebrating indigenous storytelling in the South Pacific.
NATIVe – A Journey into Indigenous Cinema will screen 16 short and feature-length films at the Berlin festival, with a mixture of fiction and documentary.
On the line-up is Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen, Hepi Mita's documentary about his mother Merata Mita, a pioneer for Māori women in film-making. The documentary premiered at the New Zealand International Film Festival in 2018.
Vai, a new anthology film from the producers of Waru, brings together nine female Pacific film-makers and was filmed in seven countries: Fiji, Tonga, Solomon Islands, Cook Islands, Samoa, Niue and New Zealand.
The film looks at a journey of empowerment through culture via the life of one woman, Vai, played by a different indigenous actress in each country.
