Kai Pūrākau – The Storyteller (1987)

Gaylene Preston's documentary on writer Keri Hulme — filmed two years after Hulme shot to global fame thanks to her Booker Prize-winning novel The Bone People — is both a poetic travelogue of Ōkārito (the township she lived in for 40 years), and a sampler-box of musings on Hulme's writing process, whitebait fishing, the supernatural, and the 1200 pages of notes for her next novel, the elusive Bait. Leon Narbey's camerawork is aptly alert to the magical qualities of the coast, from the resident kōtuku to the surf and birdsong peppering Hulme’s crib.

Production

Gaylene Preston Productions