Aroha depicts a young Māori chief's daughter who embraces the modernity of the Pākehā world (attending university in Wellington) while confronting her place with her own people (Te Arawa) and traditions at home. The NFU-produced dramatisation is didactic but largely sensitive in making Aroha's story represent contemporary Māori dilemmas (noted anthropologist Ernest Beaglehole was the cultural advisor). Watch out for some musical treats, including an instrumental version of classic Kiwi song, 'Blue Smoke' and a performance of the action song 'Me He Manu Rere'.
This film is made up of three segments that share no plot but have a general thematic relationship. In the first segment, Virginia and her three children are left by her shiftless husband and she is courted by an old beau who is now divorced.
In 1937, a young First Nations girl named Ashtecome is kidnapped along with several other children from a village as part of a deliberate Canadian policy to force First Nations children to abandon their culture in order to be assimilated into white Canadian/British society.
When an academic unearths a forgotten history, residents of the small township of Pukekohe, including kaumātua who have never told their personal stories before, confront its deep and dark racist past.
Matt Harding is a boy in trouble on the journey of a lifetime. When a judge orders him to live with grandparents he's never known in a sleepy, farm town, his only plans are for escape.
Popular movie trailers from 1951
These some of the most viewed trailers for movies released in 1951:
Hanna Amon and her brother Thomas live on an estate they've inherited from their parents. Local veterinarian Brunner loves Hanna from afar, and Thomas is in love with the daughter of the local mayor.
On a golden afternoon, wildly curious young Alice tumbles into the burrow and enters the merry, madcap world of Wonderland full of whimsical escapades.
After conning a potential buyer into believing that Queenie's herd is diseased, nasty would-be empire builder Duke Drake is confronted by the girl's new tough foreman Bill Foster.
This short little cartoon is based on the popular song by Jack Rollins and Steve Nelson, first recorded in 1950 by Gene Autry as his followup to Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.
Fong Yim-fun puts on a tour de force as an ill-fated woman, separated from her lover through an arranged marriage to the terminally ill and impotent son of a warlord.
