Screen legends

WORDS: NIKI PARTSCH

For a screen industry power couple, Ōtaki might seem an unlikely place to live and work. But for Libby Hakaraia and Tainui Stephens, the Kāpiti Coast town has proved the perfect base from which to create work – and make an impact.

With 25 years of screen industry experience, Libby (Ngāti Kapu, Ngāti Raukawa) has produced and directed many documentaries and films (she produced the recently released feature film Cousins). Tainui (Te Rarawa) is also a producer and director, and a well-known television broadcaster.

These days they’re also the driving force behind the Ōtaki-based Māoriland Charitable Trust. The trust runs the Māoriland Hub, a centre of excellence for Māori film and the creative arts, and the Māoriland Film Festival. They’re ventures that, while oriented to the couple’s community, have impacts far beyond Kāpiti and have made Ōtaki an international destination.

Ōtaki’s population of just under 4000 swells over summer with whānau visiting from out of town and other holidaymakers. But it receives another boost in early autumn when the Māoriland Film Festival is held.

Launched in 2014, Aotearoa’s international indigenous film festival showcases indigenous films made by indigenous people. It’s now the Southern Hemisphere’s largest presenter of indigenous film content, and in 2023 its programme featured 148 events including screenings of feature and short films from Aotearoa and around the world, presentations, exhibitions and a red-carpet party featuring the Modern Māori Quartet.

Libby says the success of the festival is testament to the effort and dedication of the trust’s small, committed team.

“It’s about honouring storytellers from the grassroots all the way through to award-winning indigenous filmmakers.”

Libby says she and Tainui are passionate about the work they do, not just because they’re filmmakers but as a means to recognise the 380 million people around the world who identify as indigenous. She says showcasing indigenous stories and storytellers to a wider audience through the festival creates impact.

“We have a lot of Pākehā coming to our festivals and they say things like ‘I never knew what Māori were trying to say about the Treaty, about loss, about all the effects of colonisation, and they [the festivals] have made us feel enabled to have a conversation with Māori and to continue that conversation long after the festival ends’.”

A community hub reimagined

The festival (along with the trust and its other ventures) takes its name from the Maoriland Films Company, a subsidiary of the New Zealand Moving Picture Co, which operated briefly in Ōtaki in the early 1920s.

The trust also embraced another aspect of Ōtaki’s heritage when it chose to base the Māoriland Hub in a building on Ōtaki’s main street that had a long history as a community hub of another kind.

From 1924 to 2014 the building was the home of the iconic Edhouse’s department store. Customers, many of whom were from farming families, viewed Edhouse’s as a destination and came from throughout Manawatū and Wairarapa.

The Edhouse family also originally lived in the building; Don Edhouse was born there, and after a lifetime working in and later running the store, he was the family member at the helm when the doors closed in 2014.

Libby remembers Edhouse’s well.

“When you walked through those shop doors it was like stepping back in time. You had menswear on one side and womenswear on the other and both those sections went all the way back,” she recalls.

“It could be packed to the gunnels, but it was always very quiet. It was a beautiful old trappedin-time kind of service for the community.”

The Edhouse family was well known for looking after their community and extended credit to most of their customers, many of whom lived with the financial uncertainties that came with farming.

“They did things for Māori, and Edhouse’s was a beloved and important part of our community. When it closed, the town was in mourning.”

Libby says no one knew what would happen with the building, although, as she recalls, some developers had approached Don Edhouse with plans to carve up or demolish the space.

“So when we came through the door and said, ‘We’d like to open a film and creative arts centre’, I think he saw an opportunity to keep the love he had for the community and the love the community had for this building.”

The almost century-old building had been empty for two years before the Māoriland Charitable Trust took possession of it, and its team began removing layers of dust.

“It was really sad because you could still hear the stories whispering from the walls,” Libby says.

The old carpets were removed along with the dust, but the beautiful wooden floors underneath were retained. The couple didn’t want to modernise the space, instead maintaining the character of the building to keep the space ‘alive’ for everyone.

“It allows storytellers to feel the old stories, but they can come in and actually tell their own stories too,” says Libby.

The Māoriland Hub opened in March 2017, and it has since hosted hundreds of events including film screenings, music and drama classes, community hui, art exhibitions, balls, and workshops on filmmaking and technology for school children.

The ground floor is where the public mainly come to enjoy the space – to visit Toi Matarau Art Gallery, spend time in the performance, work or theatre spaces (the hub is also home to the Māoriland Tech Creative Hub, or MATCH, and Māoriland Productions) or visit the community gardens at the rear of the building.

Upstairs houses office space and the Māoriland Filmmaker Residency. Last year the hub hosted its first filmmaker-in-residence, Leah Purcell – an accomplished indigenous Australian actress, writer and film director.

Light in the dark

Community is at the heart of another recent venture launched by the trust – the Matariki Ramaroa multidisciplinary arts festival. Ramaroa is a beacon or light emanating from the dark, and the festival is held over a month during Matariki.

ŌTAKI: GET YOURSELF THERE

 Matariki Ramaroa is a month-long multidisciplinary arts festival – including music, arts, theatre and community events – run throughout the Kāpiti region during Matariki. In 2022 it was bookended by two public light sculpture events at the beginning and end of July. For more information on the 2023 programme during Matariki, visit matariki.maorilandfilm.co.nz/about

 The Māoriland Hub is open year-round Monday to Saturday 11am–4pm and is at 68 Main Street, Ōtaki. For information on upcoming events, visit maorilandfilm.co.nz/maoriland-hub

 The Māoriland Film Festival runs for a week in March, sharing films from around the indigenous world, and celebrated its 10th year in 2023.

The first festival was held in 2021, but the 2022 festival was blighted by storms pounding the Kāpiti Coast. It was during this event that the trust discovered that what really resonated with people were the festival events that involved lighting beacon fires on the beach.

“We are drawn like moths to the flames and to storytelling and to singing waiata around the fire,” says Libby.

Matariki, as a time of seasonal change, is a great opportunity to bring the community together to have important conversations, she says.

“We provide a space for people to come together and to think and talk about what Matariki means to them. We want them to think about the maramataka of this whenua.

“We want to ensure that the Māori pūrākau around Matariki are at the forefront of everything that we do with this kaupapa, and that’s for everybody. It’s about that māramatanga for whānau.” kaupapa: project, initiative or principle maramataka: Māori lunar calendar māramatanga: enlightenment pūrākau: stories, traditional stories waiata: songs whenua: land