White Lies

At the time, I didn’t even know anything at all about New Zealand. I was taken by the film in a very, very profound way, and I thought, ‘if I could choose where I want to live and where I want my daughter to grow up, I would choose that place’.

– Director Dana Rotberg, on deciding to move to New Zealand the morning after seeing Whale Rider

I became haunted by her [the medicine woman]. That was to me a clear sign that the story told by Witi Ihimaera was speaking to me from places other than where the original work had come from. Places that belong to my intimate family history and my most unresolved conflicts as a person in the world.

– White Lies director Dana Rotberg

It takes weighty matters of colonial history and cultural identity and wraps them up in a cracker yarn about life and death, dark and light, deceit and discovery.

– Reviewer Peter Calder in The NZ Herald, 22 June 2013