Merata Mita

Merata was born at Maketu in the Bay of Plenty and was educated at Te Puke High School before going on to study at Auckland College of Education. While teaching at Kawerau College she began working in film as a tool for teaching. She went on to work on a documentary in 1977 and in 1978 documented Ngāti Whatua protestors being apprehended by police at Bastion Point which led to the making of Bastion Point: Day 507 co-directed by Merata, Leon Narbey and Gerd Pohlmann. Further collaborations with Pohlmann produced The Hammer and the Anvil and Karanga Hokianga ki o Tamariki. Her next major production Patu! focussed on the 1981 Springbok tour. This film had its world premier at the Wellington Film Festival on 23 July 1983 and was ‘the first feature-length documentary in New Zealand directed by a woman.’ In 1988 she directed the feature film Mauri which screened at the 1988 Film Festival and won the Italian Rimini Film Festival’s best prize.

In 1990 she produced the documentary Mana Waka which utilised footage of the four waka commissioned by Princess Te Puea for the 1940 New Zealand Centenary celebrations. Her subsequent documentaries included The Shooting of Dominick Kaiwhata (1993), The Dread (1996) and Hotere (2001). She directed Che Fu’s Waka video which was awarded the Hawaii Music Awards Music Video of the Year in 1999.

Along with her work as a director, Mita worked for the Māori TV news programme Koha as a presenter, reporter and researcher. She also worked in the US for many years acting in Geoff Murphy’s Utu, and in Rowley Habib’s The Protesters when it was adapted for television. Mita was also involved on the production team of Murphy’s Spooked and Boy and was executed producer of The Land Has Eyes.

As one of New Zealand’s keynote film-makers Mita received the Leo Dratfield Lifetime Achievement Award for Documentary from the Robert Flaherty Foundation in 1996. Her work was honored at the First Peoples Festival in Montreal, Quebec in 2003 with a retrospective of a selection of her films and in 2005 Mauri was featured at the First Nations First Features Program at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Smithsonian Instiution’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC. In 2010 she was a recipient of the Companion of the Order of Merit in the New Year’s Honours.

She was an inspiration to many young film-makers, holding workshops, panel discussions and teaching indigenous screenwriting at the University of Hawai’i Manoa’s Academy of Creative Media where she was an Assistant Professor. She contributed to the creation of Te Paepae Ataata Trust – an initiative to support Māori film making – through discussions with the late Barry Barclay and Tainui Stephens. She was a Sundance Film Institute script advisor, a member of the national Geographic’s All Roads Film Project Board of Advisors, on the Sundance Institute’s Native Programme Board of Advisors and was patron of the Image Native Film Festival. She was creative advisor and artistic director to the Sundance/Moonstone screenwriters labs run in New Zealand in 2003 and 2004. In 2005 she was one of the Australian Film Commission’s creative advisors for their ‘The Long Black Writers Lab’ – a special screenwriters lab for Aboriginal Australian writers and directors. She also took up the role of artistic director at the Sundance Film Festival’s Native American Filmmakers Workshop and was responsible for coordinating the inaugural Native Hawaiian Film Festival: The Hawaiinuiakea Film Festival in 2005.

Biographical sources

• "Merata Mita." http://www.paepae.co.nz/about-us/members/merata-mita/ 20 May 2011.
• "Merata Mita." http://www.nzonscreen.com/person/merata-mita/biography 19 May 2011.
• Mita, Merata. "Merata Mita: Film-makers." Te Ao Mārama: Regaining Aotearoa: Māori Writers Speak Out. Comp. and ed. Witi Ihimaera. Contributing ed. Haare Williams, Irihapeti Ramsden and D. S. Long. Vol. 2: He Whakaatanga O Te Ao: The Reality. Auckland, N.Z.: Reed, 1993. 278.