Australian producer Antony Ginnane brought this $6 million romp to New Zealand, after Aussie union Actors Equity objected to the four lead roles going to foreigners. Deer hunting heroes Donald Pleasance (Halloween) and Ken Wahl (six years before becoming TV's Wise Guy) race around in helicopters and jet boats, after discovering a half-sunken WWll plane. This opening excerpt indicates the film's mixture of action, comedy and Southern scenery. Zephyr helped establish Aotearoa's reputation as a place to film; Ginnane and Kiwi John Barnett produced further projects together. 

Taken from an unflinching anti-drink driving road safety campaign, this 1982 ad was made for the Ministry of Transport by Kiwi ad company Silverscreen. The concept was inspired by controversially imagined scenes in Oscar-winning 1979 Vietnam movie The Deer Hunter, in which US soldiers are forced to play Russian roulette by their Vietcong captors. The idea of equating the risks of drunk driving with Russian roulette has been repeated many times since, including campaigns by advertising agencies in Thailand and Italy.

Introduced to New Zealand in 1851, red deer soon became controversial residents: sport for hunters, but despised by farmers and conservationists for the damage they caused. First targeted by government cullers in the 1930s, by the 60s they were shot by commercial operators for venison export. Directed by Bruce Morrison and Keith Hunter, this award-winning documentary catches up with the hunt in the 70s, when deer for farming – dramatically caught alive, from helicopters – was a multi-million dollar gold rush. Different versions of the film were made for overseas markets.

This feature documentary goes beyond the supermarket deep freeze, to look at the stories behind the meat that ends up on our plates. The film is built around three farmers and a hunter: industrial pig farmer Ian, who argues profit is not his main motivation, straight-talking 'one-woman farming operation' Jill, chicken farmer Tony (who discusses killing 1000 chickens a week), and deer hunter Josh, who thinks that many lack awareness of how food gets to their plate. Directed by David White (short film I Kill), Meat can be watched in full via The NZ Herald website (see link below). 

Heart of the Stag showed that director Michael Firth could handle actors as well as skis (his first film, ski documentary Off the Edge, was Oscar-nominated). Bruno Lawrence stars as a man working for a King Country farmer (Terence Cooper), who romances the farmer's adult daughter (Mary Regan) and starts wondering about the strained family dynamic. A rare drama dealing with incest, Heart of the Stag was praised by The LA Times as "electrifyingly good".  The NZ Herald said it handled a delicate subject without compromise. Metro voted it the best Kiwi film of 1984.

In the decades after WWll, introduced deer had become major high country pests, and they were culled in their thousands. By the 1960s entrepreneurs were recovering the meat for export, then later live capturing animals for farming stock, using helicopters. This 1980 National Film Unit documentary follows pilots Norm Kensington and Doug Maxwell on a mission in Fiordland: flying low over imposing mountains, nabbing a deer with a net gun, then ferrying it down the valley hanging from the chopper. Directed by Chris Dillon, the wordless film is scored by Chris Cree Brown. 

Barry Crump's iconic deer hunting yarn A Good Keen Man captured Kiwi imaginations. Published in 1960, it quickly sold 300,000 copies, and with Crump cast as an "ironic, laconic sort of super-bushman", made him a legendary literary figure. This excerpt from the award-winning documentary looks at Crump's upbringing and early success as a writer. The full 72-minute documentary covers everything from his fractured family relationships, violence, a life-changing incident on a bush camp, and discovering religion, to the ads for Toyota that reignited Crump's profile in the 80s.