Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen

I don't think they could live with a dull mother now. They expect the level of political and intellectual stimulation they get around here.

– Merata Mita on her older sons, in The Auckland Star, 23 June 1987, page B1

The public is conditioned to accept negative images of the Māori. The values and worth of Māori people are continually overlooked.

– Merata Mita in an interview with Helen Martin, The Listener, 14 October 1989, page 31

...a loving and often revealing portrait of a seminal figure in the development of this country’s film culture.

– Reviewer Peter Calder on Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen, The Listener, 14 July 2018

"Hepi, I’m starting a production company, and I want one of my first projects to be a film about your mum — and I want you to direct it. And if you don’t want to make it, then I’m not going to do it."

– Heperi Mita recalls how producer Cliff Curtis invited him on board, as told by Heperi Mita, E-Tangata, 12 May 2019

...fascinating and insightful if also (perhaps necessarily) somewhat checkered . . . With just a few brushstrokes, Heperi paints a very specific historic, geographic and familial context in which Merata’s character, her outrage and her can-do attitude would so severely clash with the obstacles thrown at her by life and the society she lived in that it could only result in her becoming an activist for women’s and Indigenous rights.

– Reviewer Boyd Van Hoeij, The Hollywood Reporter, 10 Febuary 2019

My mother once said what you see when you look at an archival film are resurrections taking place. A past life lives again, and something from the heart and the spirit responds.

– Heperi Mita, at the start of this documentary

One of my primary goals is to decolonise the screen, and to indigenise a lot of what we see up there.

– Merata Mita, in one of the television interviews included in this documentary

...she was tough on herself as well, and she would work to a standard, and she'd expect everyone else to work to that standard too.

– Merata Mita's son Richard Rautjoki

..almost every project that Mum worked on, she had us kids working on it too.

– Merata Mita's daughter Awatea

But of all my Mum's untold stories, there is none greater than her own . . . as I try to piece together that story, from old home movies through to Hollywood feature films, I get a glimpse of the woman she was.

– Heperi Mita, in the excerpt

Swimming against the tide becomes an exhilarating experience. It makes you strong. I am completely without fear now.

– Merata Meta in an interview with Listener writer Helen Martin, 14 October 1989