Paul Maunder

Paul Maunder was educated at Victoria University in Wellington before going on to graduate from the National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA), in Australia. He later studied filmmaking at the London Film School where he was swept up in the excitement of European filmmaking during the counter-cultural days of 1968.

Returning to New Zealand, Maunder's search for employment coincided with a fortuitous opening for a director at the National Film Unit. He began what would be a five year period working at the Unit. During this time he completed ten films, and distinguished himself as a filmmaker who never did things by the book.

His vision of the Commonwealth Games, Games 74, was screened throughout New Zealand cinemas. Maunder was one of a team of four directors, and also helped edit; the film attracted polarized comments for its resolutely downbeat imagining of the sporting spectacle.

In 1971 Maunder's screenplay for TV, a drama titled Saturdays, won the Ngaio Marsh TV Playwrights Award.

The opportunity to direct one of his own scripts came the following year when the incumbent Head of Drama at NZBC, Mike Scott-Smith, commissioned a number of independent productions. Maunder's Gone Up North For A While (1972), a story of a young unmarried woman's struggle with an unplanned pregnancy, was one of the most memorable. Made in a naturalistic style that had been rarely seen in New Zealand to date, the film was widely seen and discussed at a time when parliament was debating introducing a domestic purposes benefit for unwed mothers. A year or so later, the bill was passed into law. Gone Up North For A While won the Feltex Award for Best TV drama.

Maunder followed this success with a two-part drama about mental illness, One of Those People Who Live in the World (1974); and then a feature length experimental drama Landfall (1975). Featured in the cast was one of his fellow Film Unit directors, Sam Neill.

Landfall was shown at film festivals, including the Pacific and Asian Film Festival in Shiraz, where it won the top award, the Golden Ibex. Unfortunately the film was never widely distributed, and so was little seen in this country.

By that point, Maunder had left The Film Unit to pursue his interest in theatre. He developed his own theatre company, Amamus, who were invited to perform at an international festival of ‘free theatre' in Poland, and also staged a production on London's West End.

Returning to New Zealand, Maunder alternated between work with Amamus, occasional directing for Close to Home, and developing a new feature film project.

1979's Sons for the Return Home, based on the novel by Samoan writer Albert Wendt, was the first feature to examine the experiences of Pacific Islanders in contemporary New Zealand. Shot in NZ, Western Samoa and London, the film chronicles life for Sione, who moves down under at the age of four, and later meets a palagi woman while studying at university. Sons for the Return Home won an acting award in Czechoslovakia for star Uelese Petaia; locally it played in main street cinemas.

Maunder's preference for working in "socialistic situations" meant he was becoming disenchanted with the increasingly Hollywood-styled nature of local film production, and he became more interested in theatre projects. He would go on to write or develop more than 15 plays, many of them on historical and bicultural themes. He has also produced community videos, and developed some as-yet unrealised drama projects, including a historical film set in Taranaki.

Paul Maunder is currently living on the West Coast and writing a PhD thesis on community theatre.

2009 saw the publication of Maunder's short story collection Tornado. The title story - which mixes a real life tornado and a Greymouth video shop -  won the South Island Writers Association Short Story competition.

Sources include
'Paul Maunder'(Profile) - Playmarket website. Accessed 9 February 2012