Vincent Ward, speaking of his coming-of-age film Vigil (1984), observed that ‘Childhood is a common theme in New Zealand writing.’ He ascribed the omnipresence of this theme – rightly, in my opinion – to the youth of the country itself, which was only systematically colonized from Europe after 1840, and did not gain full independence until the adoption of the Statute of Winchester in 1947: ‘Perhaps this is due to the relative newness of the national identity, and “rites of passage” stories reflect this coming of age.’ Given the importance of the coming-of-age theme in New Zealand literature and its critical role in registering an emerging cultural identity as the country sought to define itself, it is not surprising to find that coming-of-age films occupy an equally prominent place in the rapidly growing canon of New Zealand feature films, nor that their preoccupations reflect issues of concern in each subsequent decade as the emerging identity of the nation has evolved. It is almost as if creative minds in the country, aware of momentous changes taking place in the nation's sense of its own emerging identity, chose the cinematic coming- of-age genre as a vehicle through which to work through the complex emotional reactions that were elicited by this phenomenon. In the rest of this book, I will trace the shifts that have occurred in these preoccupations, relating them to the social, cultural, and political contexts that motivated them.

THE ADVENT OF THE COMING-OF-AGE FILM

Even though fiction films began to be made in New Zealand as early as 1913, with three romances on Māori subjects directed by Gaston Méliès – Loved by a Maori Chieftess, Hinemoa, and How Chief Te Ponga Won His Bride – coming-of-age films did not begin to be made until the mid-1970s, with the possible exception of Runaway (John O'Shea, 1964), which can be regarded as a post-adolescence exercise in the genre. The first true coming-of-age film was The God Boy (Murray Reece, 1976), a television-feature made for the newly created national broadcasting channel, Television One. Shortly afterwards, there occurred a remarkable flowering of New Zealand feature-filmmaking following the commercial success of the next coming-of-age film, Roger Donaldson's Sleeping Dogs (1977) – a flourishing that occurred partly as a result of a tax loophole that aspiring filmmakers suddenly realized they could exploit.