Mercury Lane, Series One, Episode Seven

The film was meant to be a tribute to those people of of outstanding courage who came out, never having been involved in a situation like this before, but driven by principle and driven by the need to express some kind of outrage at injustice. It stands as a tribute to who we really are in this country.

– Merata Mita at an anniversary screening of her documentary Patu!

We’re a theatre company. We did a show of The Happy Prince last year around schools. We can do puppets. I'm doing a radio serial at the moment. It's just a smorgasbord of things, and it's a big problem because when someone asks you what the Aunties are, it's very hard to give a succinct answer.

– Auntie Uncle (Arif Usmani) tries to define what the Aunties theatre group does

I actually think their weakness of them is that their external image doesn't actually match their performance. I think the problem is that you sort of think of the Aunties, they've been around for 18 years, they're actually a bit dated. A lot of kids are used to Barney, and they're used to Bananas in Pyjamas, they're used to Wiggles. These are terribly packaged products...

– Sweeney Vestie corporate strategist Rachel Catanach on The Aunties' image

Auntie Uncle developed the Aunties for a government work scheme in 1983. Abandoning a law degree, he formed a group that would turn generations of children on to theatre. But after all these years, the Aunties are creaking under the strain of competition from offshore entertainers.

– Presenter Marcus Lush describes The Aunties theatre group

I always feel that if you have five trombone players, you have a lot of trombone. We get people that have some quality, and we just go with it, and we design things around them. We don't have a preconceived idea, and try and put people in; if some interesting people come around, we develop songs and ideas and routines around them.

– Auntie Uncle (Arif Usmani) on designing their shows around the talents of the group's performers

In those days we still had a really fierce belief that the main ingredient that you need to make a film is the passion and commitment to make it.

– Geoff Murphy on his filmmaking ethos in the early days

I don't know how many times I've been asked by American women, "how is it that New Zealand is able to turn out so many women filmmakers when we here can’t even get a handful?’ . . . it's an amazing truth that we probably, the few we have here, are as many as what any other country has in the world. There are just so few of us. And as for being indigenous and a woman filmmaker, it's even a rarer breed.

– Merata Mita on being an Indigenous female filmmaker

If you want to do something different, well you have to pay the consequence.

– Auntie Uncle (Arif Usmani), when asked how he feels about the success of fellow childrens entertainers The Wiggles

...Pork Pie was shot in six and a half weeks. It was a very quick shoot. And we had to travel 1200 miles while we were shooting . . . We had 24 on the crew. Like it t was a very very lean mean machine that shot that picture. At the end of three years I'd earned $30,000 on Pork Pie. I was earning less than the Film Commission's typist you know. And the thing had made millions for somebody else.

– Geoff Murphy on making his breakthrough film Goodbye Pork Pie

The kids travelled with us . . . if we went to a town and put on a show and made enough money to feed everybody and get to the next town, that was the baseline of the operation. It wasn't any concept of being stars . . . Bruno was the boss, and that was acknowledged by everyone. But he ran the thing like an anarchy, which basically meant that no one else was allowed to be the boss, and he wasn't gong to lead anybody...

– Geoff Murphy recalls the days of travelling with multimedia troupe Blerta