The Maoriland Film Festival has had support from indigenous groups and film-makers from around the world.

Is this Aotearoa's own Sundance?

The main street of Ōtaki is not State Highway 1, with its interminable traffic jams, countless service stations, coffee outlets and places to buy knock-down undies.



Nope, the true main street of Ōtaki (called, oddly enough, "Main Street") is a left-turn off the last roundabout heading north. Head down the road for half-a-kilometre or so and you'll find yourself in the sort of country town we all really, deep down, wish we could claim as our true home.

It's a brilliant little nook; friendly, funny, idiosyncratic and populated by a group of people who always seem to have just found something to laugh about.

SUPPLIED Birkebeinerne – The Last King will screen as part of this year's Maoriland Film Festival.

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On the summer's day I visit, I'm an hour early for my appointment with Tainui Stephens, husband of Libby Hakaraia and one-fifth of the formidable collective who drive the Māoriland Film Festival, so I potter around a couple of Ōtaki's array of op shops. A couple of books I'd been looking for for ages, and one perfect little solid wood coffee table (15 bucks!) later and I'm sitting in the sunny wee courtyard at the back of what was once Otaki's beloved Edhouse's department store.

It's a cavernous space, being repurposed and renovated around us, as we chat about Libby and Tainui's vision for the festival; Ōtaki's nearly-world-famous showcase of the very best of Indigenous film making and film makers from around the planet.

N/A Birkebeinerne – The Last King is a historical epic set in civil war-ravaged Norway

Libby explains the origins in the festival programme introduction:

"About 15 years ago, I was working on a television project involving films shot in New Zealand in the early 1900s. One of the films had as its end frame, "The town of Otaki, home of Maoriland Films and the Los Angelos (sic) of New Zealand's Moving Picture Industry".

"The film was made in Ōtaki nearly 100 years ago, and it featured many of my relatives of Ngāti Raukawa descent. I printed that frame and put it on my fridge. I came to reflect often on the possibility of Ōtaki becoming a film-hub again."

SUPPLIED After the Apology will screen as part of this year's Maoriland Film Festival.

The festival launched in 2014. Lacking the money for a billboard on the highway, the team – Libby, Tainui, cousins Pat and Tania and niece Maddy – scraped together the dollars for a tiny, dilapidated caravan Libby had seen for sale. The van was signwritten and then pressed into service as the festival's billboard, office and ticket-booth rolled into one.

The following year, the crew moved into offices in town. In 2016, the decision was made to lease the now vacant Edhouse's site. And in 2017, a perfect storm of fundraising by the Māoriland Charitable Trust, hard work and an unstoppable optimism in the future of the festival came together to purchase the building.

In 2018, The Māoriland Film Festival rolls out its fifth installment for a five-day season, from March 21 to 25.

When the Maoriland Film Festival launched in 2014, a caravan was the festival's billboard, office and ticket-booth rolled into one.

The programme is a genuine ripper, showcasing 15 feature-length and 86 short films from 11 countries and 65 Indigenous nations.

Most of the international content has never screened in New Zealand before. Films and film-makers from the First Nations and Indigenous peoples of Australia, North America, Norway, Finland, Papua New Guinea, Sweden, Tonga, Panama, Norway and Greenland are represented.

There are thrillers, big-budget spectaculars and family movies here, as well as stories that will truly break your heart in two and put it back together stronger than it was before.

Movies like Waru have demonstrated why New Zealand is hailed as a global leader in indigenous film-making.

One of them is the astonishing Birkebeinerne – The Last King, from Oscar-nominated Sámi filmmaker Nils Gaup. A historical epic set in civil war-ravaged Norway, it's rip-roaring, ski-mounted fight scenes tearing through snow-clad mountains are – trust me – like nothing seen you've before.

There's also the New Zealand premiere of Larissa Behrendt's landmark documentary After The Apology, exposing the shocking number of Aboriginal children still being removed from their families in Australia. The rate today is currently higher than it was during the time of the Stolen Generations, from 1910 to the 1970's.

But why a showcase at all? What is it about Indigenous and First Nations' film making that demands the existence of festivals like Māoriland and its sister ships around the world?

The Maoriland Film Festival now has a permanent base in Ōtaki's former Edhouse's department store

If we define Indigenous as the original people of a country now colonised by others, then the answer is clear. The Māori writer and film-maker Barry Barclay (Tangata Whenua, Ngāti) wasn't the first person say, "we are one country, but more than one nation", but he was the first person to drop it on me. I've found it useful ever since.

If all we ever hear is one side of our story, then we are locking ourselves out of rooms in our own homes.

Aotearoa/New Zealand is regarded as a global leader at telling our own tales. The domestic and global success of films like Waru and Boy are regarded with awe by Indigenous filmmakers around the world, while the career trajectories of Taika Waititi and others are celebrated by a creative rebel alliance that sprawls from the Arctic Circle to the furthest reaches of South America and Polynesia.

The annual Maoriland Film Festival is attracting larger audiences year upon year.

As Hakaraia said last year, "Over the past 20-plus years, Māori film has been widely acclaimed and continue to attract international attention. We'll see what happens. But for now, with the support of our Indigenous filmmaking community worldwide, Māori will continue to aim for the stars with their filmmaking!"

Robert Redford's Sundance Festival – founded in 1978 to celebrate independent and Indigenous American cinema – is surely one of the grandaddy's of the movement. Every January, Park City in Utah, a town about the size of Ōtaki, is swollen by 40,000 plus visitors from around the world.

Hakaraia sees no reason why the Māoriland Film Festival shouldn't be the southern hemisphere equivalent. And with vistor numbers jumping from 2500 in 2014 to 12,000 in 2017, there's every reason to believe the festival has the potential.

Maybe, a 100 years later, that promise of, "The town of Otaki, home of Māoriland Films and the Los Angelos (sic) of New Zealand's Moving Picture Industry", might just be an idea whose time has come.