Geoff Murphy was the trumpet player who got Kiwis yelling in the movie aisles. His 1981 road movie Goodbye Pork Pie was the first big hit of the Kiwi film renaissance. He completed an impressive triple punch with the epic Utu, and Bruno Lawrence alone on earth classic The Quiet Earth. From early student heists to Edgar Allen Poe, this collection pays tribute to the late, great, laconic wild man of Kiwi film. Plus read background pieces written in 2013 by cinematographer Alun Bollinger, friend Roger Donaldson, writer Dominic Corry and early partner in crime Derek Morton.

One October night In 1938 Orson Welles famously fooled radio listeners into believing that the United States was under attack from martians. New Zealand’s War of the Worlds moment arguably came in 1995, when directors Costa Botes and Peter Jackson unleashed moviemaker Colin McKenzie on an audience of unsuspecting patriots. Forgotten Silver joined a sly tradition of on screen Kiwi leg-pulling: from turkeys in gumboots and John Clarke as a rock star, to fence-playing farmer musicians, phallic molluscs and Māori porn stars.

One of a select few Kiwi dramas about filmmaking, The Footstep Man centres on a man whose job is creating footsteps and sound effects for movies. Lonely, toiling under a demanding director, Sam (Brit Steven Grimes) gets trapped between real life and reel life. Cinematographer Leon Narbey’s second movie is a portrait of the strange pressure cooker of creating films, a luminous film within a film — with Jennifer Ward-Lealand as muse to painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec — and a reminder that for all the technology involved, moviemaking is about the human touch.

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.   

Greg Mayor was one of the only journalists in the world to visit the set of Jane Campion film The Piano. In this report, Mayor and a camera crew from Marae encounter Māori extras on location at Karekare Beach. Actor Pete Smith (The Quiet Earth) undergoes four hours of makeup, most of it getting his moko painstakingly applied; the film's Māori Advisor Waihoroi Shortland remarks that things are improving in terms of how Māori are treated in the film world, but argues that truly Māori stories are yet to be told; and ta moko artist Gordon Hatfield is among the waiting extras. 

In Gaylene Preston's War Stories, her mother Tui revealed that she had fallen for another man while her husband was off at war. In Home by Christmas, inspired by an audio interview with her father Ed, Preston looks again at her parents' life during wartime. In this behind-the-scenes doco, veteran actor Tony Barry talks about the acting techniques which allowed him to "be, rather than play, Ed"; Preston reveals that Barry's distinctive voice is almost a carbon copy of her father's; and Chelsie Preston Crayford talks about portraying her own grandmother.

Peter Jackson's love affair with moviemaking and special effects was ignited by seeing the original King Kong (1933) as a child. Jackson's Kiwi-shot remake takes one of cinema's most iconic monster movies, retains the 30s setting and iconic New York finale, and toughens up the "beauty" (Naomi Watts). The film also transforms the male (non-ape) lead from lunkhead to sensitive playwright (Adrien Brody). Exhilarating, Oscar-winning CGI brings the great ape to life, alongside rampaging dinosaurs, and oversized wētā inexplicably absent from the maligned 1976 remake.

Decades in Colour sourced home movies from more than 800 New Zealanders to paint a picture of New Zealand life, from "the inside out". Made by company Greenstone for Prime, each one-hour episode covered a decade from the 1950s to the 1970s, from post World War II recovery through to suburbia to cultural awakening. Presented by broadcaster Judy Bailey, the clips are narrated by the home moviemakers and their subjects. Bailey called it "a unique family history of the one family to which we all belong". A second series followed in October 2017. 

Seven stand-alone contemporary dramas, collected together under one umbrella. The stories in this television series showcase a fresh wave of 1980s independent filmmakers. They cross the gamut from gritty kitchen sink dramas and oddball tales of Kiwi heroes, to Jewel's Darl, an acclaimed romance staring future transsexual MP Georgina Beyer. Five of the About Face directors went on to make feature films; 23-year-old Jennifer Ward-Lealand's performance in Danny and Raewyn won a GOFTA award.