In 1865, Wellington became the Kiwi capital. In the more than 150 years since, cameras have caught the rise and fall of storms, buildings, and MPs, and Courtenay Place has played host to vampires and pool-playing priests. Wind through our Wellington Collection to catch the action, and check out backgrounders by musician Samuel Scott and broadcaster Roger Gascoigne. 

This documentary follows the then world champion All Blacks on a 1989 tour of Wales and Ireland. With star winger John Kirwan as guide, 'The All Black Film Unit' gives a players’ insight into an international tour in pre-professional, pre-media trained times — there’s even a plate of oranges. Match, training, and travel footage is complemented by relaxed encounters with players (Zinzan Brooke mounting a shetland pony has entered rugby folklore). Producer Ric Salizzo repeated the recipe — sports fandom mixed with schoolboy pratfalls — in the successful Sports Cafe series.

Members of the NZ team for the 1954 Vancouver Empire Games are profiled in this edition of the Pictorial Parade series. Yvette Williams demonstrates the long jump technique — filmed in slow motion — that had made her an Olympic champ and world record holder (and would win her the gold medal at Vancouver), and there’s a brief shot of a young Murray Halberg. Other features are a piece about the canine star of Dick Campion and the NZ Players' production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and a multi-national approach to treating children with cerebral palsy in Rotorua.

This impressionistic 1989 short film, directed by Mark Summerville, imagines gay tribal life on a fantasy South Pacific Island. Shot by Mairi Gunn, the film ripples with watery blues; a stormy Maggie Rankin soundtrack and whispered narration (from Ivan Davis) backgrounds images of marine sirens, coral crowns, apples, tapa, and entwined seaweed. In the middle of it all — a game of underwater hockey... The short film crossed the seas to gay film festivals in San Francisco, Vancouver and Hamburg, and toured with a British Film Institute selection of shorts.

Love, annoyance, jealousy...families can be hotbeds of many kinds of emotion. Documentary Some Kind of Love chronicles the contrasts between two very different siblings: artist, theatre designer and rampant hoarder Yolanda Sonnabend, and her brother Joseph, a pioneering AIDS scientist who moves to London to look after Yolanda, as she battles dementia. Filmmaking team Thomas and Sumner Burstyn continue the exploration of family begun in acclaimed 2009 documentary This Way of Life. The result has won invites to film festivals from Vancouver to Auckland.