Merata Mita in Person Out of footage shot in the late 1930s, Merata Mita, a leading New Zealand filmmaker and actress and a Maori, has created a film that, according to Variety, "casts its spell over the viewer; the Sydney festival audience appeared enthralled." Mana Waka is a record of the construction of a number of Maori waka taua, or war canoes, in New Zealand. Both the canoe-building project, commemorating the seven ancestral canoes that brought the Maori people to Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the film, shot between 1937 and 1940 by R.G.H. (Jim) Manley, were the great vision of a great woman and Maori leader, Princess Te Puea Herangi. She had laid down that any film "must uphold and uplift the Maori people," and that the film, once completed, also would serve to unite people. Manley's footage was never printed, however, and remained unseen until, in 1983, the New Zealand Film Archive and its Director, Jonathan Dennis undertook the task of preserving the unedited footage out of which Mita created the film we see tonight. Bill Gosdon wrote for the 1990 Wellington Film Festival, "Mita has molded an eloquent and beautiful film from Manley's eloquent and beautiful moving photographs...Events have been filmed from an aesthetic vantage point...emotion, and the rhythm of the work, not narrative, propel the film...(Manley's) detachment is emphasized by the addition of music and sound effects which keep their distance and never pretend to take us closer than is possible. The effect is extraordinarily haunting; the nearness and the distance of the past are in constant tension...(We) are privileged to be granted this sustained glimpse of our nation fifty years ago."