Māoriland Festival reviewed in International Film Online Magazine

Felicity Collins, Associate Professor in the Department of Arts and Critical Enquiry School of Humanities at La Trobe University Melbourne, reviews the inaugural festival in Senses of Cinema. Kia ora mai Felicity and thanks so much for coming to our Festival and spreading the word internationally!

“The inaugural Maoriland Film Festival demonstrates the potential for engaging local communities and international visitors with a broad range of film events, from archival restorations to the founding classics, from contemporary hits to cutting-edge shorts. The location of the festival in Otaki also demonstrates the necessity of providing culturally appropriate venues for different kinds of screenings, involving the very oldest and youngest members of the community, as well as a diversity of guests from both the northern and southern hemispheres. It’s one thing to see an Indigenous film or two in a major film festival, it’s quite another to see Indigenous films and to listen to Indigenous filmmakers in a context such as Maoriland. The festival director, Libby Hakaraia, and her warmly hospitable team, including the tireless Tainui Stephens who hosted so many koreros, have laid the ground for an annual festival which has the potential to transform settler-centric screen cultures by bringing transnational Indigenous films and filmmakers to the southern hemisphere, emulating and expanding the work of ImagineNative in the northern hemisphere.”

Read Felicity’s review here.