Ainsley Gardiner. Photo / Babiche Martens
Shilo Kino talks to film-maker Ainsley Gardiner about her focus on Māori storytelling.
Ainsley Gardiner is probably not a household name — but she should be. She's a world-renowned writer, film producer and director, with a portfolio that oozes with some of Aotearoa's most successful films - Boy; Two Cars, One Night; Eagle vs Shark; Waru; and most recently, Cousins, just to name a few.
I meet Gardiner at a park in Tāmaki Makarau, masked up and sitting two metres apart. We are both Maori, both wāhine and both passionate storytellers. It doesn't take us long to connect on our hunger for te reo Māori.
"Our relationship to language is as complex as our relationship to identity and what it means to be Māori. I totally have struggled with my Māori identity my whole life," she tells me.
Gardiner is of Te Whānau-ā-Apanui, Ngāti Pikiao and Ngāti Awa descent. Identity and belonging are issues she has grappled with her whole life.
"I always struggled with the idea of not being Māori enough, not feeling comfortable on the marae, not looking like all of my cousins, since my mum is Pākehā. At that time, we referred to ourselves as half-caste, as if that were a thing. When you don't exactly know who you are, but you've got a deep longing or sense of knowing that you're part of something, you just don't know exactly what that something is. And I think that's what a lot of Māori experience. I felt like I was something but I didn't know what that something was.
"Film-making is also all about language, visual language and cinematic language. It's all about the words you choose and the pictures you choose are very specific and loaded with metaphor and loaded with meaning. That's what te reo Māori has that I still really long for."
Gardiner had a middle-class upbringing and says her parents had a tremendous influence on her life. Both public servants - her mum Pauline Gardiner is a former New Zealand Member of Parliament for the National Party and United New Zealand. Her dad, Sir Wira Gardiner, the founding director of the Waitangi Tribunal, has spent most of his life advocating for Māori.
"Film-making is a public service and I feel like I am somebody who serves my community by the work that I do."
It was at the age of 4 and after watching a black and white version of The Little Mermaid that Gardiner says she fell in love with the power of film.
"At the end of the movie the mermaid dies and turns to flowers and I was just beside myself. I was crying my eyes out and from really early on I understood the power of film and how it is able to transport you into other worlds and more importantly make you feel connected. Even though it can be an entirely different world to your own, you could identify with that thing or that person or what that character was going through."
It led her down a path of film-making, producing and writing. She studied production at the Avalon Film and TV School and was mentored by producer Larry Parr and film-maker Merata Mita.
But Gardiner still wrestled with the idea of not feeling Māori enough and often turned to her mentors for tautoko.
"When we made Taika [Waititi]'s first feature film, Eagle vs Shark, we were being challenged by people - by Māori mostly - about why we weren't telling Māori stories. The way we responded to those questions at that time was, 'Well it's a Māori film because it's made by Māori. So who are you to say it's not?' I would have these conversations with Merata, that I don't feel Māori enough. Am I Māori enough to tell Māori stories? And one of the most significant pieces of wisdom she gave me was that my whakapapa tells me that I'm Māori and that's all I need. And my experience of being Māori is as valid as anybody else's.
"The other thing she said to me was that the way that you silence your detractors is with your success. So just be successful and that will do the trick. So that's what I concentrated on doing."
Gardiner spent her teenage years living in Whakatāne and moved back nine years ago with her three children because Auckland became "too expensive". She moved back to Tāmaki Makaurau only two months before lockdown with her three daughters, aged 7, 13 and 21.
Motherhood has had a massive impact on her career. Her experience as a solo mother on the benefit in the middle of her film-making career transformed into the ground-breaking Waru, where Gardiner told a story of a solo mum struggling to make ends meet. Waru was a pioneer film made up of eight 10-minute short films, each written and directed by Māori women film-makers - the second film in history directed by wāhine Māori since Mauri, by Merata Mita, in 1988.
"I was a middle-class and well-educated person on the unemployment benefit for a couple of years and it really smashed my sense of self and my own capability," she says.
"It was soul-destroying to see how cruel the welfare system was, how they would cut my benefit off at the drop of a hat. I would leave Work and Income every time in tears."
Falling on hard times spurred Gardiner into her next phase of film-making.
"I thought about the power of Work and Income in determining how struggling solo mothers see themselves and their worth in the world and then I thought about the power of film in determining how Māori see themselves. I recognised the privilege to have a voice in the film industry and I began to tell stories about what it means to be a wahine Māori stepping into our own power."
She went on to co-direct Cousins, with Briar Grace-Smith, a film Gardiner says was important because it was "part of a narrative that turned around the way in which a lot about women see themselves".
It took years to get to the big screen and Cousins was met with critical and commercial success, debuting at number one at the New Zealand box office in the middle of a pandemic and picked up by streaming service giant Netflix.
"Cousins was a convergence of a lot of things for me. It was my first feature as a director so that's a scary experience in itself and there was the opportunity to honour Merata, who had tried to get this film made, and then to honour Patricia Grace, and then the opportunity to make films within my own whānau and hapu."
Now as one of the most senior Māori film-makers in the industry, Gardiner continually acknowledges her privilege in helping tell the important stories.
"After doing Cousins and working in my own iwi with my own people and still not having confidence in the reo and tikanga, I had to focus again on what it means to be Māori. It does swing back to being more about that wider community. How do I use my privilege in terms of the opportunities that I have to make films and how I can have a positive influence on Māori? How I can influence our industry? How I can influence Māori communities more broadly? What influence do I have in the kind of global indigenous landscape?
"There's the hashtag #byMāoriforMāori but there's still the question - by which Māori and for which Māori? We can't ever serve all of our people all at once. And that's something I still struggle with."
In the last decade there's been an appetite for indigenous storytelling worldwide but Gardiner says the narrative for her has always been the same.
"It's like the rest of the world has just taken a lot of time to catch up," she says. "The film industry is based on a white, patriarchal system that comes out of Hollywood. In New Zealand, four or five or six of our top 10 films of all time are Māori content. Everyone's known for a long time that people love Māori stories and maybe what we have taken a while to catch up on is that people have an appetite for Māori stories made by Māori film-makers. Something that is truly authentic and not an impression of what those things are.
"You get so sick of seeing Māori being wallpaper to other people's stories, our faces, our culture being the background to either somebody else's story entirely or a white man's story or the backdrop to somebody else's impression of us. And in the last 10 years or so, the interpretation of what we are and who we are and how we are is not deep enough, it's not rich enough.
"That's because you don't know and actually, when you step aside and let us tell our own stories, they are far richer and deeper."
One of the early films she worked on as a producer was Two Cars, One Night, in 2003 and directed by Taika Waititi. It was the second short film from New Zealand to be nominated for best short film and tells a story of two Māori kids waiting in the carpark for their parents.
"People would come up to us and say, 'That's the first time my kids have ever seen themselves on screen.' The greatest kind of praise that we could have received is that we made Māori feel good about themselves."
Her career has naturally led her to work on Night Raiders, an indigenous sci-fi film directed by Danis Goulet, a Canadian of Cree descent, out next month. The film is set in a dystopian, post-war America where children are property of the state. It tells the story of an indigenous mother who is on a mission to rescue her daughter from a federal institution.
"Night Raiders was a massive opportunity for indigenous storytellers to tell stories globally and to collaborate globally. And Danis is a sister from way back."
Perhaps what makes Night Raiders unique is the collaboration between indigenous people of Aotearoa and Canada. Gardiner says the film will resonate with Māori.
"Night Raiders is about stolen generations, children taken away from their parents to be raised by the state, stolen land and the oppression of native peoples. And then Danis had always had this idea to write a Māori character and part of her inspiration was Standing Rock and what she was aware of is that there are Māori everywhere. Anywhere there's a protest, Māori will respond, and they'll go and they'll show up in hordes."
The future for indigenous film is global domination, Gardiner says. But also local by serving our own people and telling our stories. She says one day she wants to go back to Whakatāne and make films.
"The success of all of our projects has always been cultural specificity for a global audience. And while having this global community to make a film like Night Raiders which was actually shared between our countries and also shared on screen with Māori and Native American.
"Maybe for me the future continues to lie with more culturally specific films. The industry can feel quite oppressive and hard to manage, so having these global networks of other indigenous film-makers who are experiencing similar things and able to support each other has been one of the coolest parts of being a film-maker."
Night Raiders launches at the NZIFF in Wellington on November 5. See nziff.co.nz for screening information.
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