This 1982 film, made for the New Zealand Council for Recreation and Sport, is an impressionistic exploration of play. Child narrators talk about what play means to them, while the images capture young people engaged in recreation. The focus is on informal play: kids and teenagers at playgrounds, hunting for frogs, reading, skylarking in the snow, doing cartwheels on the beach, fixing motorbikes, skipping, stargazing and playing Space Attack. Seagulls inspire dreams of flight for a young girl, and a fancy dress ball for adults shows the enduring spirit of play. 

Pirate radio hit Kiwi airwaves on 4 December 1966 when Radio Hauraki broadcast from the Colville Channel aboard the vessel Tiri. Made by Sally Aitken, this film reunited the original pirates for the first time in 30 years to recall their battle to bring rock’n’roll to the youth of NZ. Featuring rare archive footage, the tale of radio rebels, conservative stooges, stoners, ship-wrecks and lost-at-sea DJs was originally made as a student film. It was bought by TVNZ and screened in primetime to praise: “Top of the dial, top of the class” (Greg Dixon, NZ Herald).

“There are one million passionless moments in your neighbourhood; each has a fragile presence which fades as it forms.” So says a voice in this early Jane Campion collaboration with Gerard Lee (Sweetie, Top of the Lake). Made — without permission — while both were students at Australian Film, Television and Radio School, the short eulogises 10 such moments to wry effect, from ‘Sleepy Jeans’ (misheard lyrics), to ‘Sex ... Thing’ (idle yoga thoughts). The celebration of the micro-absurdity of suburban life showed in the Un Certain Regard slot at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival.

On 4 December 1966 pirate radio hit Kiwi airwaves when Radio Hauraki broadcast from the Colville Channel aboard the vessel Tiri. In this feature, rookie director Craig Newland and writer Andrew Gunn fictionalise the true life story of the station’s battle to get to air — overcoming courtroom rulings and a conservative state broadcasting monopoly, as well as storms at sea. Go Girls actor Matt Whelan (who was Moa-nominated for the role) plays young rebel journo Richard Davis, fighting for free speech, the freedom to choose, the woman he loves … and rock’n’roll!

This headline-grabbing 1979 documentary examines inequality via interviews with an unemployed student, a young widow and a Porirua family of eight; plus visits to a Fijian village and a Hong Kong housing estate. The film's arguments that business and government monopolies had caused poverty in “egalitarian New Zealand”, and that NZ trade practices had added to it elsewhere, displeased Prime Minister Robert Muldoon. State television refused to screen the Greg Stitt-directed documentary; CORSO, the charity who commissioned it, was removed from the government’s funding list.