PATU! Film Screening and Talk

30 July 2019. Free entry.

Tuesday 30 July | Talk: 6:00 – 6:25pm | Film screening: 6:30 – 8:22pm
Venue: CWEA - Canterbury Workers Education Association, 59 Gloucester St

From material preserved and made available by Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision. Thank you to the Mita whānau for providing access.

Presented in conversation with our current exhibition Spontaneous Intentionality by the 2019 University of Centerbury Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies Artist in Residence, Tuafale Tanoa'i. We warmly invite you to join us for soup and a screening of PATU! by Merata Mita, whose work in advocacy, documentary, and film has been hugely influential on Tanoa'i's practice.

The film will be introduced with a short talk by Sam Uta'i discussing activism and leadership in Aotearoa.

Merata Mita (1942 - 2010) is a key figure in the story of Māori filmmaking. Through documentaries, interviews and her only dramatic feature Mauri, she was a passionate voice for Māori, and an advocate for social change.

PATU! is Merata Mita's passionate record of clashes between protesters and police during the 1981 Springbok tour. It marked Aotearoa's first feature-length documentary directed by a woman. Police sought court orders to get hold of footage, to help them prosecute protestors; Mita hid footage, and complained of police harassment during the editing process.

The subject of intense media coverage, PATU! was described by reviewer Peter Wells as "the hottest documentary ever made in New Zealand". Yet local cinema chains weren't interested (at this time documentaries rarely played in Kiwi cinemas, outside of film festivals). PATU! was invited to film festivals around the globe. In 2012 it became one of the first documentaries listed on the New Zealand section of UNESCO's Memory of the World project.

This screening is generously hosted by the Canterbury Workers Education Association.