Merata Mita

A passionate advocate for Māori creative control, director Merata Mita chronicled landmark moments of protest and division in Aotearoa. Her work included Patu!, a documentary on the 1981 Springbok tour, and Mauri (1988), only the second feature to have a Māori woman as director. She features in documentaries Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen and Merata Mita - Making Waves.  

I've been stereotyped as a radical political filmmaker, but I don't see myself as radical at all. I see myself as representing what already exists — representing the truth. I'm expressing a Māori viewpoint all the time. To white middle-class New Zealanders that may be something new. And because I'm a Māori woman it's seen as dangerously radical; but to Māori people it's what they always knew. Merata Mita, in 1986 book Head and Shoulders, page 62