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MerataMita

Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāi Te Rangi
  • Director
  • Writer
  • Producer
Merata-Mita.jpg

A passionate advocate for Māori creative control, director Merata Mita chronicled landmark moments of protest and division in Aotearoa. Her work included Patu!, a documentary on the 1981 Springbok tour, and Mauri (1988), only the second feature to have a Māori woman as director. She features in documentaries Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen and Merata Mita - Making Waves.

 

Screenography

Utu Redux
2013 As: Matu, Cultural Adviser Film
Saving Grace - Te Whakarauora Tangata
2011 Director, Producer Television
Boy
2010 Co-Producer Film

Biography

Merata Mita is a key figure in the story of Māori filmmaking. Through documentaries, interviews and her dramatic feature Mauri, she was a passionate voice for Māori, a provocateur, an advocate for change, and an inspiration to a growing global tribe of indigenous filmmakers.

Awards

2011 Aotearoa Film and Television Awards
Nominated (posthumously) for Best Director Documentary: for Saving Grace - Te Whakarauora Tangata 

2010 Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit
For Services to the Film Industry

“I've been stereotyped as a radical political filmmaker, but I don't see myself as radical at all. I see myself as representing what already exists — representing the truth. I'm expressing a Māori viewpoint all the time. To white middle-class New Zealanders that may be something new. And because I'm a Māori woman it's seen as dangerously radical; but to Māori people it's what they always knew.”

— Merata Mita, in 1986 book Head and Shoulders, page 62