As the film and TV industry continues to grow rapidly, with more Māori representation on screen than ever before, Māori producers and married couple Kristin Ross (Ngāti Kahu, Ngāti Tara) and Hōhepa Tuahine (Te Arawa, Tūhoe) say Māori need to control the way they are represented on screen and hold the intellectual property rights to shows they are involved in.
Taking Māori stories to the world is the goal for Ross and Tuahine following the recent rebrand of their former production company, Punarau Media, to Long White Cloud Productions.
"The name Long White Cloud carries the rich history of discovery when Kupe first came to Aotearoa and draws on the courage, innovation and determination our forebearers had when navigating the great seas of the Pacific Ocean before arriving on our shores," Tuahine says. "It is also a reclamation of arguably the most commonly used Māori concept that serves as an identity marker for Pākehā, back into the hands of Māori."
They say they've grown as a company and have refined their purpose and objective to create unique storytelling from deep in the South Pacific for the world to enjoy.
They are both champions of te reo Māori and tikanga Māori. Five years ago they established Punarau Media with the intention of creating shows in te reo Māori.
With the establishment of Long White Cloud, Tuahine says the goal remains the same as with Punarau Media to showcase Māori stories, Māori worldview and Māori custom in an authentic way while lifting the status of Māori onscreen. The only difference now with Long White Cloud is that they have added a global focus to the company.
The two have ventured overseas in the past three years to network and attend content exchanging events such as MIPCOM, an annual trade show and the global market for entertainment content across all platforms.
"With support from Te Mangai Paho and Poutama Trust, we went to MIPCOM in France in 2019. MIPCOM is an incredibly exciting content market where people buy and sell shows and films. There were massive television and film giants there like Disney, Netflix, National Geographic and more." Ross says.
However, Ross says what was evident while they were there was that the world is running out of stories and that those giants want stories from indigenous communities.
Concerning
"While that is exciting, it is also very concerning because the people who usually take indigenous stories or representation to the screen don't belong to that community or group. Instead, they come in and mine our stories, our likeness, our language, our customs, our look, our motif, our lands and locations and walk away with the full intellectual property rights to sell at places like MIPCOM."
"It is no different locally here in Aotearoa. Non-Māori make shows about Māori or use Māori language, look, or location all the time and walk away with the rights while Māori are attached in a consultation-like role. More often than not, the scripts have been written or the angle and direction of the show has already been established by the time Māori arrive at the table, giving us little say in how we are represented on screen in the final product," Tuahine says.
The solution
"We need to assert our mana to our oral traditions, to our art forms, to our language, to our likeness, to our philosophies, to our flora and fauna, to our deity, to our customs and to our worldview whenever they are used or incorporated into productions by non-Māori," he says. "We as Māori need to realise that these things often serve as the most valuable elements to these productions, yet we so freely hand them over."
For too long Māori have been mere attachments or consultants to these types of productions, Ross says. "We believe as Māori we have everything in our power and ability to lead, own, and control the way we are portrayed onscreen by ourselves. We do not need a savior who is non-Māori to come in and show us how to do it while making claim to ownership."
"As Taika Waititi said, we are the original storytellers. Now it’s time for us to be unapologetically ruthless about being the owners and controllers of those stories that we tell or contribute towards in every single context."
It is such an exciting time for Māori in the industry, she says. "All we need to do is realise and believe in our potential as storytellers."
Long White Cloud provides a range of media and production expertise from public broadcast to corporate contracts.