In Spring One Plants Alone

In the late 1970s filmmaker Vincent Ward spent a year and a half visiting remote Maungapōhatu in the Ureweras, capturing the bond between 82-year-old Māori kuia Puhi and her adult disabled son, Niki. This excerpt from Ward's evocative documentary opens with karakia and tears at a urupa. Puhi gives Niki his medication and chops wood to heat their spartan cottage, all the while reciting prayers. More than two decades later, Ward revisited the life story of Puhi in the feature-length Rain of the Children. In Spring One Plants Alone was shot by acclaimed cinematographers Alun Bollinger and Leon Narbey. 

Perhaps the most original talent of New Zealand's first wave belongs to 24-year-old Vincent Ward . . .[The film] took Ward a gruelling one and a half years to film because of the superstitions and physical infirmities of the old woman . . . at once a study of the role of ritual in day to day survival and an indictment of the fate of New Zealand's Polynesians.

– The Los Angeles Times, 27 July 1980

Key Cast & Crew

Vincent Ward

Director, Producer, Research

Jack Body

Composer

Alun Bollinger

Cinematographer

Leon Narbey

Cinematographer

Chris Lancaster

Editor

Don Reynolds

Sound