Māori, Aboriginal co-production wins best feature at Canadian media awards

We Are Still Here picked up an imagineNATIVE award at a Toronto film festival. Photo / Whakaata Māori

A co-production by indigenous filmmakers from Australia and New Zealand has landed a major prize at Toronto's imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Awards.

'We Are Still Here weaves together eight indigenous stories from 1000 years of history across Australia and Aotearoa, with a particular focus on the damage colonisation has inflicted upon indigenous populations.

The collaboration won the Best Dramatic Feature during Tuesday's awards.

"The film tells history, from our perspective, with the impacts that the coming of settlers had upon our people and how our lives changed," co-writer-director Renae Maihi (Ngāpuhi, Te Arawa) said.

"It's a story of survival and resilience."

Maihi said assembling the movie had been particularly hard, with Covid-19 restrictions meaning four teams in Australia and Aotearoa had to wānanga digitally; she said she hoped the team's win would inspire more indigenous wāhine filmmakers to tell their people's stories.

"Our pain and our resilience and our survivorship throughout this really challenging period of hundreds of years [is] valid, and it was hard, and your tears and the tears of our ancestors matter," Maihi said.

Film director and screenwriter Renae Maihi. Photo / Supplied

Film is a way to connect the brutal realities of colonisation with the effect that has had on indigenous communities for generations.

"It gives voice to our pain and our resilience, and also brings truth and reality to what happened to us as First Peoples," Maihi said.

"It's hard to connect with those ideas if you're not indigenous but, when you're in a cinema and you're now following the perspective of a character who is struggling with human issues, you walk in their shoes with them."