Watch Wake

Wake compares colonial paintings of New Zealand intended to encourage migration to the colonies in the 1850s, with filmed images of the same country 100 years later, shot by the filmmaker's father. Wake compares the vision of a "promised land" with the lived memory of migration and explores too, the misrepresentation of indigenous people during both these eras. The half-hour experimental film is a response to the death of the filmmaker's father, an event that ultimately led to her return to New Zealand after a decade in America. Wake was reissued in 2006 to accompany a monograph written by Annie Goldson, Landscape, Memory, Dad and Me, published by Victoria University Publications.