KEY POINTS:
Film-maker Alister Barry agonised for months about whether to name his most recent film The Hollow Men.
The film draws on the 2006 Nicky Hager book of the same name which used leaked emails to expose the scheming and manipulations of Don Brash's lieutenants in the 2005 election campaign. But Barry worried people would think the subject was ancient history if he used the same title.
The reception accorded to the film in screenings during the film festivals suggests he need not have worried: it has played to sellout houses and the audiences have stayed on for Q&A sessions afterwards. To him, it is evidence of the keen public appetite for the documentarian's scrutiny of our democratic process.
For more than 35 years, Barry, who turns 60 next month, has been making films that explore the nature of power and how it is exercised. In the 1970s, he filmed the flotillas protesting against French nuclear testing at Mururoa Atoll and edited the footage for broadcast in the bedroom of his Grafton flat. Later he examined the diplomatic and political process by which New Zealand entered the Vietnam War and, with colleagues, followed an industrial dispute in the South Auckland branch of the timber workers union.
But it is the "new right" revolution, started by the economic policies of Roger Douglas in the mid-80s and continued by National's Ruth Richardson, that has informed his more recent work. In Someone Else's Country (1996) and In a Land of Plenty (2002) he looked at those economic changes, which were based on a strategy that caused unemployment and extreme social disadvantage - not as a by-product but as a calculated plan. A Civilised Society (2007) analysed the effects of free market reforms on public education. The Hollow Men is similarly about the manipulations of political power and makes a sobering watch as we settle into an election campaign.
The interesting thing about all Barry's work is that it does not so much offer new material - 90 per cent of the footage in The Hollow Men is from the archives of broadcast television - as give us a chance to consider its subject anew.
"If I was forced to say what I do, I would say I was a historian looking at modern New Zealand history. But what I do is what journalists do: I make sense of how our society works and explain it as clearly and honestly as I can."
Barry's critics would doubtless swoop on that "clearly and honestly" claim. The film-maker, who told OnFilm magazine that a television image of a Vietcong prisoner being dragged behind an armoured personnel carrier "tipped me out of uncertainty into moral assertiveness", plainly advances an anti-right agenda. But he says the Rogernomics revolution and what followed is "the most important thing that happened in New Zealand since the election of the first Labour Government in the 1930s. It was important in our conception of who we are" and that part of his role is to offer a reconsideration of things we might have lost sight of - or have never seen in the hurlyburly of events.
Right-wing commentator Matthew Hooton criticised Hager's book for cherry-picking and "creating a story far worse than the lived reality had been," Barry remembers.
"But that is precisely what we are supposed to. We are meant to look at the unfolding busyness of the world and try and find what are the important moments to describe how the world works. What we should be aspiring to do is make our democracy work with less of [the manipulations shown in the film] and more discussion of policy."
Having documented the last 35 years, Barry might be forgiven for feeling jaded and cynical. But he doesn't.
"I believe in human progress," he says. "Last year was the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery. That happened because a majority of people decided that it was unacceptable. I think I have been able to make a contribution to the debate far in excess of what has been justified by the scale of my circumstances."
On screen
What: The Hollow Men
Where: Academy Cinemas Auckland
