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 (Canadian native) 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:
Five-year-old Patsy has competition for her father's attention from the family's new baby. Her attempts to win her father's praise receive instead a rebuke.
Bored with her bourgeois life, the young Maria Variani, daughter of a professor, meets Bruno, who is part of an amateur jazz group, and allows herself to be persuaded to join the band that plays during the radio program "The microphone is yours".
