Real Pasifik is a roving celebration of Pacific food and culture. Inspired by chef Robert Oliver’s acclaimed cookbook Me’a Kai, the show follows Oliver as he travels across the Pacific, aiming to inspire resort chefs to showcase indigenous cuisine. In this opening episode of the first series, Oliver heads to the Cook Islands where he visits a marae for a kai blessing, before tasting goat and taro from an an umu (earth oven). He goes lagoon spear fishing, samples pink potato salad (aka ‘mayonnaise’) and serves up a banquet of locally-cooked food to assembled VIPs. 

Australian Idol winner Stan Walker made his acting debut in this hit feature, as aspiring singer Turei. Part of a whānau of Māori potato pickers from Pukekohe, he has to choose between duty to job and family (Temuera Morrison plays his hard-working Dad) and letting the music play. His dilemma takes place as reggae star Bob Marley performs in Aotearoa in 1979, offering the chance for Turei's band Small Axe to win a supporting slot at Marley's Western Springs concert. Released on Waitangi Day 2013, Tearepa Kahi's debut feature became the most successful local release of the year.

In this 2011 series Te Radar re-teams with company JAM TV (Off the Radar, Radar’s Patch) to meet people making a difference to sustainability issues. This first episode sees the comedian exploring green motoring: he visits a Kiwi project to make potato starch wing mirrors for a Nottingham F3 racing team; checks out the Trekka (the only NZ designed and mass-produced car) with journalist Todd Niall; rides a battery-powered Citroën in Whangarei, and tinkers with his Dad’s Land Rover. The first season won a 2012 NZ Television Award for Best Information Series.

“Here is a taste of the best and worst of Backch@t 2000…goodnight.” Presenter Bill Ralston introduces this reel of outtakes and highlights from the Gibson Group arts series. The creative sector's issues of the day include installing Len Lye’s Wind Wand, arts funding, and arts patron Denis Adam’s thoughts on Te Papa’s arts displays. Ralston, reporters Mark Crysell and Jodi Ihaka, and film reviewer Chris Knox all get tongue-tied; there’s a tiff between two architecture panelists, brief appearances by Ian McKellen and Miriama Kamo, and opera singer Jonathan Lemalu hits a low note.

“Balls, bungy and videotape” is the tagline for this Loading Docs short film. The Jump celebrates the DIY spirit of unsung Kiwi hero Chris Sigglekow — who leapt off a bridge in jeans in 1980 for arguably the first modern bungy jump. Sigglekow recalls, and VHS footage shows, the pioneering jumps: from a boxing bag, to his and AJ Hackett’s famous Auckland Harbour Bridge leap. The first doco by ad director Alex Sutherland, Jump won 140,000+ views when it was made a Vimeo Staff Pick, and it was shared by surfing legend Laird Hamilton. Caution: contains Stubbies and Speedos.

The iconic all-things-rural show is the longest running programme on New Zealand television. With its typical patient observational style (that allows stories of people and the land to gently unfold) it’s an unlikely broadcasting star, but New Zealanders continue, after 50 plus years, to tune in. Amongst the bucolic tales of farming, fishing and forestry, there are high country musters, floods, organic brewing, falconry, tobacco farming, as well as a fencing wire-playing farmer-musician, a radio-controlled dog, and Fred Dagg and the Trevs.

This National Film Unit documentary records the 18-month-long building process of a waka taua (war canoe): from the felling of the trees — opening with an awe-inspiring shot of the giant totara selected by master carver Piri Poutapu — to the ceremonial launch. The waka was commissioned by Māori Queen, Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu, and built at Tūrangawaewae Marae. The Harry Dansey-narrated film was significant in showing the importance of the canoe-building kaupapa alongside the everyday lives of the workers (at the freezing works, the pub).

R&B singer and TV personality Stan Walker (Tūhoe/Ngāti Tūwharetoa) was born in Melbourne but raised in New Zealand. After moving back across the Tasman, he won Australian Idol in 2009 and launched a music career which has included a chart-topping album (From The Inside Out) and single (‘Black Box’), plus multiple NZ Music Awards. In 2013, Walker he helped judge the first series of X Factor NZ and made his film debut as star of box office hit Mt Zion  — playing a potato picker with dreams of supporting Bob Marley. 2014 saw the release of ensemble te reo single 'Aotearoa'.

In this bilingual cooking series made for Māori Television, globetrotting chef Joe McLeod presents international dishes combined with New Zealand ingredients and elements of traditional Māori cuisine. In this episode, fish is the order of the day as McLeod prepares pan fried groper fillet, a southern crayfish medley, salmon and potato cakes, and Fijian baked fish on succulent vegetables. The less piscatorial desserts include crepes with diced mango and apple, vanilla custard with a tangy mango jelly, and lemon and honey cake. 

Auckland school boy, and master of "the fine art of doing nothing", Josh Murphy realises a couch potato's dream in this episode of the award-winning young inventors' series. A self professed "lazy boy", Josh has dreams of a motorised chair equipped with the necessities of life — Playstation, DVD player and fridge. The show's challenge to Josh is to build his chair and spend a school day in it (including classes, rugby practice and school production); but did the resident experts really try out a jet powered chair? Or was it all a dream for slothful Josh?