NZ On Screen's Car Collection is loaded with vehicles of every make and vintage, as a line-up of legendary Kiwis get behind the wheel — some acting the part. The talent includes Bruce McLaren, Scott Dixon, Bruno Lawrence, a clever canine, and a great many bent fenders. Onetime car show host Danny Mulheron tells tales, and picks out some personal favourites here. 

Attitude is a weekly series looking at the issues and interests of people living with a disability. This episode features Kiwi teenager George Cairney, who suffered a serious head injury after getting into a car with a drunk driver. The 19-year-old now has a child-like personality, and has to re-learn everything. Also featured is a story on two former NYC police officers who were among the first responders to the Twin Towers terror attack. The pair talk about the health issues and post-traumatic stress disorder they and their colleagues suffer.

The theatre of sport is given full-blown operatic treatment in this National Film Unit classic. Footage from the French 1979 rugby tour of New Zealand is rendered in slow-motion and cut to a Tchaikovsky score. The result is an often glorious, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, paean to rugby. Balletic lineouts, driving tackles, and the dark mysteries of the ruck, make for a ballsy Swan Lake in the mud. It includes the Bastille Day French victory over the All Blacks. Directed by NFU stalwart Arthur Everard, it won a jury prize at the Montreal World Film Festival.

Open Door is a community-based TV series where groups or individuals make a documentary about an issue that concerns them. This frank and moving episode is about Positive Women, a support organisation for women and families living with HIV or AIDS. The HIV positive women interviewed include health care worker Jan Waddell, who became HIV positive after a needle stick injury, and Marama Pala, who was diagnosed after sleeping with Peter Mwai, the musician who was later charged with having sex with multiple partners while knowing he was HIV positive.

This 2007 episode of Extraordinary Kiwis follows personable stuntwoman Zoë Bell as her career leaps into the stuff of fantasy: a big acting role in Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, playing herself while balanced on top of a speeding car. Home movies reveal a childhood spent on the family trampoline, and training for gymnastics. Later Bell learnt about fighting and wire work while doubling for Lucy Lawless on Xena: Warrior Princess. A ligament injury on Kill Bill left her sidelined for three months, but Death Proof would open doors to further acting roles, including Tarantino's The Hateful Eight.   

This episode from the TV3 series of mini World War I stories looks at Harold Gillies and Henry Pickerill, two pioneers of plastic surgery who grafted “new hope onto despair” for soldiers whose faces had been demolished by war. The short details new methods the pair developed at Sidcup in England, a specialist unit set up by Gilles. It conveys the bravery of the surgeons and nurses in the face of appalling injuries, as well as the courage and “unquenchable optimism” of the patients. Presented by Hilary Barry, Great War Stories screened during 3 News.

This award-winning documentary is an account of the last days and sinking of Russian cruise liner Mikhail Lermontov. On 16 February, 1986, she ran aground on rocks in the Marlborough Sounds. Passengers were successfully evacuated, but a Russian crew member lost his life, and several were injured. Evidence is given by those who were there, with a particular emphasis on presenting the stories of the Russian crew, who were largely unavailable to the media at the time. A minute into clip nine, one young Russian agent bears a striking similarity to Russian president Vladimir Putin.

The zenith of Don McGlashan and Harry Sinclair's legendary Front Lawn collaborations, this iconic Kiwi short follows two men and one woman on a rainy night at a deserted bar. Pivoting on amnesia and woven together by music, two timeframes are seamlessly combined and a darkly humorous plot unfolds. The film had a wide international release (Ireland to Norway, Germany to the USA) and was a finalist in the inaugural American Film Festival.

On the 22 December 1995 episode of Shortland Street, a truck ploughed into the clinic’s reception, causing carnage. The first excerpt is taken from the follow-up episode, which screened on Christmas Day. Nurse Carmen (Theresa Healey), having apparently only received minor bruising, suddenly collapses. The second clip, from the next instalment, sees her wheeled into hospital — shortly before she died from a brain haemorrhage, and delivered a whopper of a soap shock. In 2002 longtime Shortland scribe Steven Zanoski named the truck crash among his favourite Street stories.