Merata Mita as Matu in Utu (1983)
Merata Mita collapsed while in Newmarket, Auckland and died a short time later on Monday 31 May 2010.
Merata Mita was a key figure in the story of M?ori filmmaking. Through documentaries, interviews, public speaking and her 1987 dramatic feature Mauri, she was a passionate voice for M?ori and an advocate for social change.
Merata Mita grew up in the Bay of Plenty town of Maketu, the third eldest of nine children. She had a traditional rural M?ori upbringing, and recalls watching newsreels when films were projected onto the walls of the local wharenui.
Later, during eight years teaching at Kawerau College, Mita began using film and video to reach supposedly unteachable high school students, many of them M?ori. “What they were all good at was expressing themselves through art, image, drawing.” The experience taught Mita “how powerful image was in reaching people who don’t have other communication skills”.
Mita worked on her first documentary in 1977, helping a P?keh? filmmaker organize interviews with M?ori people. But she soon began to grow disenchanted at M?ori misrepresentation on film, and at how M?ori seemed to be employed only to liase with M?ori communities for P?keh? filmmakers.
In May 1978 Mita got a telephone call telling her “to get a film crew up to Bastion Point”. Mita arrived just in time to film police removing Ng?ti Whatua protestors from the site. Lack of funds meant that Bastion Point: Day 507 (co-directed with Gerd Pohlmann and Leon Narbey) would take another two years to complete.
Mita went on to direct and co-direct films about the trade union movement and the Hokianga Catholic M?ori community. The Bridge (1982) co-directed with Pohlmann, chronicles the longrunning Mangere Bridge industrial dispute. She also worked as a reporter and presenter for M?ori TV news show Koha, and collaborated with Martyn Sanderson on cross-cultural documentary Keskidee Aroha.
Patu! was Merata Mita’s passionate record of clashes between protestors and police during the 1981 Springbok tour. The subject of intense media coverage, Patu! was described by filmmaker/ Listener reviewer Peter Wells as “the hottest documentary ever made in New Zealand”. It was also the first feature-length documentary in New Zealand directed by a woman. Local cinema chains refused to screen it. Patu! went on to screen at film festivals around the world.
Mita followed Patu! in 1988 with Mauri, only the second feature film drama to have a M?ori woman director (1972′s To Love a M?ori was co-directed by Ramai Hayward and husband Rudall). Mauri‘s plotline centres around issues of birthright and racism in an isolated rural community, with land rights activist Eva Rickard playing the central role of the grandmother.
The film was a training ground for many young M?ori crew members; Mita argued that “what you gain from M?ori people is an incredible intensity and passion about the work being done”.
Mauri won a best prize at Italy’s Rimini Film Festival. After some negative reviews of the film at festival screenings back home, Mita argued against P?keh? reviewers who were “not qualified to assess it”. She asked not that people liked the film, but that they view it with an open mind.
In making Mauri, Mita consciously rejected P?keh? traditions of storytelling. Instead she embraced a layered approach, in keeping with the strongly oral tradition of M?ori people. “These are differences that P?keh? critics don’t even take into account when they’re analyzing the film.”*
1989 saw Mita and longtime editor Annie Collins at a Steenbeck editing bench on Turangawaewae Marae. Mita had accepted the challenge of making Mana Waka (1990), a documentary which used abandoned footage chronicling the creation of four special wakas commissioned by Princess Te Puea, for New Zealand’s 1940 centenary.
Mana Waka met with its own ownership complications: at one point descendants of the original P?keh? cameraman ran off with an early print of the film, despite having already agreed to let Mita direct.
Mita also made documentaries on artist Ralph Hotere (Hotere, 2001), rastafarians in Ruatoria (The Dread) and judicial injustice (The Shooting of Dominick Kaiwhata, 1993). She also directed the video for Che Fu’s Waka, which won the Music Video of the Year Award at the 1999 Hawaii Music Awards. In 1998, Mita was herself the subject of television documentary Rangatira.
Mita spent much of the 90s working in America, alongside then partner, director Geoff Murphy. As an actor, she appeared in Murphy’s Utu and a TV adaptation of Rowley Habib’s The Protesters. She was later on the producing team behind Murphy’s Kiwi-set feature Spooked (2004) and 2010 box office smash Boy, and was executive producer on 2004′s The Land has Eyes, the first feature directed by a native Fijian.
Mita hosted workshops and spoke on panels about indigenous filmmaking in many countries. She also taught critical studies at the University of Hawai’i.
In 1996 Mita was awarded the Leo Dratfield Lifetime Achievement Award for documentary, by the Robert Flaherty Foundation.
Mita collapsed suddenly outside an Auckland television studio on May 31, 2010. The same year she had received the order of merit in the New Year’s Honours. Her long cherished dream of adapting Patricia Grace novel Cousins into a feature remained unfulfilled.
Moe mai e te rangatira, moe mai.
* Quotation from Parekowhai, Cushla. “K?rero Ki Taku Tuakana: Merata Mita and me.” Illusions Issue 9, December 1988.
Source: NZonScreen