Decolonizing Screen Production: The Practice of the Māori Film Producer

The film production ecology of Aotearoa New Zealand is an industrial and creative space controlled almost solely by Pākehā (European New Zealanders). However, since the turn of the century, Māori (Indigenous) filmmakers have risen to increasing prominence. Story sovereignty, or Māori control over Māori stories, is the heart of the enterprise and implicit in this is how the story is made, that is, the process of filmmaking. This article examines the practice of Māori film producers and discusses how they bring te ao Māori (the Māori way of being or world view) into the day-to-day management of a film production, as they adapt the Western-originated filmmaking process to their own ends. Analyzing such complexities requires a theoretical framework which accommodates not just the work of the individual, but also the relevant social and cultural context within which they operate. Prominent among the models being applied to analysis of the production of culture is the systems approach initially developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Csikszentmihalyi maintains that creativity arises when three essential features interact: the domain, or existing body of knowledge; the individual who produces variation within that body (i.e., creates something new); and the field, or network of experts who recognize value in the new and facilitate its absorption into the domain. Through critical exploration of the practice of the Māori film producer, this researcher has developed a revised version of Csikszentmihalyi's model and presents it from an Indigenous perspective: the revision incorporates and extends the original by connecting the elements of the model through the holistic framework of te ao Māori , to enable analysis of the practice of the screen producer within its specific Indigenous context.