The Camera on the Shore

AroView: Film critic Graeme Tuckett directs this sensitive tribute to the late New Zealand filmmaker Barry Barclay, who passed away during the production of the documentary. The Camera on the Shore was made over four years, as Tuckett worked initially alone and unfunded, and then with a small crew and some support from Te Māngai Pāho and the New Zealand Film Commission.

The title is Barclay’s metaphor for the camera in the hands of Indigenous people – who may or may not turn it back on the ‘ship people’ who have so readily turned it on them.

“Two weeks before he died, Barry sent me a long email about the documentary as it then stood. This is a paragraph from it: ‘Just in case it is suggested by anybody, I do not see the film as “me/me/me”. Others may be suspicious perhaps that I seized the moment for self-promotion. But I have had enough promotion to last a lifetime. What I am passionate about is seeing a document that speaks up for a whole stream of cinema that has not been spoken for in Big Media, that pays tribute and inspires the community, that despite what the funding and distribution authorities would have the country believe, we do have another tradition and are the richer for it and it’s worth maintaining.” — Graeme Tuckett, Director