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PaulMaunder

  • Director
Paul-Maunder-Key-Profile.jpg

An iconoclast with a bent for experimentation, director Paul Maunder brought the mixed flavours of social realism and the arthouse to New Zealand screens in the 1960s and 70s. Then he shifted stages and left the government's National Film Unit to concentrate on theatre. His second feature Sons for the Return Home (1979) was the first film to dramatise the experience of Pacific Islanders living in contemporary New Zealand.

Screenography

Assignment - Back to the Future
2000 Additional Footage Television
Dangerous Orphans
1986 As: Felix Film
Sons for the Return Home
1979 Writer, Director Film
Landfall - A Film about Ourselves
1975 Director, Editor, Writer Television

Biography

Paul Maunder was born in Napier in the final year of WWll. He was invited to play piano at social events, and went on to captain the school cricket team. After falling for a girl who was starring in Antigone, he was "knocked into feeling" and his longtime love of theatre.

Awards

1976 Pacific and Asian Film Festival (Iran)
Golden Ibex (Grand Prize): Landfall

1973 Feltex Television Awards
Best Drama and the Arts: shared with An Awful Silence 

 

“Nothing Paul ever did at the Film Unit was how the Film Unit had ever done it before.”

— Fellow National Film Unit director Hugh Macdonald

Related images

Lynton_Diggle_Gallery.jpg
A shot taken during the making of 1973 TV drama One of Those People that Live in the World, which was set in a mental hospital. From left to right: director Paul Maunder, camera assistant Bayley Watson and cameraman Lynton Diggle.
Kindly supplied by Lynton Diggle.