KEY POINTS:
John Feeney, New Zealand film-maker, writer and photographer, has died in Wellington aged 84.
John Patrick Feeney arrived in Egypt in 1963 to make a documentary film, intending to stay one year. Instead, he stayed for 40. He made his film, and several others, including Fountains of the Sun, which followed the Nile to its source.
His photographs, published in a book entitled Photographing Egypt: Forty Years Behind the Lens, covered topics such as mosques, lifestyles and Islamic art.
He also wrote books on Middle Eastern cooking, and became an authority on Egyptian soups.
Feeney was born in Ngaruawahia and educated at Victoria University. He served as a lieutenant in the Royal New Zealand Naval Reserve during World War II, escaping from Singapore and taking part in the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944.
He worked with New Zealand's National Film Unit on topics such as the legend of the Whanganui River and the kotuku, or white heron. In the mid-1950s he moved to Canada to film the Canadian Arctic and its inhabitants, and received an Academy Award nomination for his work on a documentary called The Living Stone, about Inuit carving.
From Egypt Feeney contributed stories and photographs to the Reader's Digest and Saudi Aramco World magazine. The Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington holds much of his work and the New Zealand Film Archive has copies of his films.
