Dance Exponents were the crown princes of NZ pop when they released this left field follow-up to their very successful debut album. ‘Sex and Agriculture’ introduced new guitarist Chris Sheehan and marked a major departure from hook-filled pop songs into harder, noisier territory. A rhythmic, driving soundtrack punctuated by Sheehan’s atmospheric guitar undercuts lyrics that could describe a rural idyll. Jordan Luck grows increasingly desperate in this shadowy, constricted TVNZ video which echoes the song’s dark claustrophobic sense of rural dread.

This special edition of the National Film Unit’s monthly magazine series looks at some of the “people, places and events filmed by our cameramen during the years 1941 - 1962”. The NFU’s 21st birthday review — compiled by David H Fowler — ranges from wartime newsreels to the post-war boom (factories, dams, industrial agriculture), from salvos to Peter Snell. Other images include Kiwi soldiers playing rugby in Korea, and cigarettes hanging from the lips of firemen fighting Christchurch's Ballantyne Department Store fire in 1947.

A pocket survey of the diversity of Kiwi farming circa 1952, this film serves as a booster’s reminder that thanks to self-reliance and research, New Zealand ranks as “one of the world’s great farming countries”. Cameraman Brian Brake captures arresting high contrast imagery: cattle move in silhouette against the sky; dust-caked fertiliser trucks emerge from clouds of lime; shirtless WWII veterans load silage onto harvesters. Meanwhile an upbeat, nationalistic voiceover pays homage to the holy trinity of good pasture, stock and climate.

This film looks at biodynamic agriculture, a Rudolph Steiner-inspired system of organic farming. The film focuses on Peter Proctor, a worm-obsessed Kiwi gardener, and his work promoting biodynamics worldwide — particularly in India, where he argues that modern industrial agriculture (eg artificial chemicals, GM seeds) has made soil and plants toxic and farming unsustainable. Proctor's simple recipe to save the planet? One man and a bucket of cow dung. Narrated by American actor Peter Coyote (E.T.), One Man screened worldwide at environmental film festivals. 

The Colombo Plan was a Commonwealth “federation of neighbours” which aimed to counter communism in Asia by providing development aid in the area's poorer countries. This National Film Unit short, directed by future NFU manager David H Fowler, ranges across Asia as it surveys New Zealand’s contributions to the postwar plan: funding hospitals, agriculture and education in Indonesia, Malaya, Sarawak, North Borneo, Pakistan and India. The film also visits Colombo students in their home countries, passing on skills that they learned while studying at NZ universities.

Coverage of a major event in the history of the NZ music industry — the pressing of Ruru Karaitiana’s timeless classic ‘Blue Smoke’ — is the highlight of this NFU newsreel. It was the first recording of a local composition performed by local musicians to be manufactured in NZ (in a very exact and highly labour intensive exercise involving men in white coats). The country’s biggest airlift of sheep, sharp shooting army cadets, high flying painters redecorating a Wellington church and heavy machinery being moved across Auckland by barge also feature.

Two decades before the animals of Black Sheep run amok, comes this Sunday night horror about a couple trapped in the countryside as the sheep start getting restless. In between encounters with a cheerful butcher and a man of God, we learn that New Zealand has undergone revolution: anyone who farms or harms animals is now branded a criminal. Directed by Costa Botes; scripted by poet and lawyer Piers Davies, who co-wrote Skin Deep (plus cult movie The Cars that Ate Paris, with acclaimed Australian director Peter Weir).   

The first leg of Peter Hayden’s journey across latitude 45 south takes him across the Waitaki Plains and up to Danseys Pass. He visits the site of a moa butchery and the sunken circular umuti (cabbage tree ovens) of early Māori. Guided by colonial literature, he visits New Zealand’s tallest tree (a eucalypt, which he finds horizontal). Drought busting desperation of 1889 and the provenance of Corriedale sheep is also covered. In a riparian side trip, Hayden heads up the Maerewhenua River where gold miners succeeded only in ravaging the landscape.

This edition of the long-running National Film Unit magazine series goes from south to north, then loops the loop. In Christchurch the cathedral and its history are toured and a service for Queen Elizabeth II is shown. Then there’s international get-togethers: a “Jaycees” congress in Rotorua; then Massey, for a Grasslands Conference. At Milson Aerodrome legless British war-hero Douglas Bader is amongst the attendees at the world’s first International Agricultural Aviation Show, and top-dressers demonstrate their “need for speed” skills above a hill country farm.

Soldiers, rubber bullets and an uncertain future: for the McKenna family, memories of life back in hometown Belfast are hardly rose-tinted. Made shortly before the Good Friday agreement radically altered Northern Ireland’s political landscape, this Immigrant Nation episode opens with Irish expats Mick McKenna and mother Mary. In between making rebel music in Wellington, Mick returns to Belfast and recalls an environment that bred violence. Meanwhile presenter Teresa O’Connor (cousin of West Coast MP Damien O’Connor) delves into her own part-Irish ancestry and identity.