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Download AudioA nine-minute film of children at Aotea’s Okiwi Primary School playing has been plucked from 9000 global submissions to play at Robert Redford’s prestigious Sundance festival of independent films in Utah next month.
Hawaiki is the fifth film by Ngāpuhi artist and filmmaker Nova Paul, whose previous 16 millimetre efforts have been made for the art gallery more than the cinema.
It was inspired by watching her son Hemi interact with his new classmates after shifting to the school after his own Auckland school opted not to finish out the year after the first lockdowns in 2020.
Hawaiki is the name the tamariki gave to the ‘no adults’ play space they created.
“But what we saw, when we watched them play – and what I’ve shown in the film – is actually they are really guided by the whenua, and a-wairua-Maori… and the ngahere. And they just seemed to drawing from tupuna korero in ways that just made a lot of sense from a Maori point of view,” Paul says.
She along with producer Tara Riddell and sound designer Larsen Winiata Tito-Taylor are looking forward to the reaction from the Sundance audience.
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