Escamilla | 1 UNITEC INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY Gerardo Alonso Escamilla Garca 1409009 New Zealand Culture & Society I Pascal

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Kiwi Country New Zealand Updated Edition (Best Selling Scenic Documentary Covering The North and South Islands): INCLUDES 3 VIDEOs ON 1 DVD PLUS MAORI HAKA PERFORMANCE. Plays in the following languages: English, Chinese Mandarin, German & Japanese. Over 100 minutes GUARANTEED to play in all countries.

Unitecs library can be a very varied place. Sometimes you find very good literature books, or other times you encounter magazines that are related to the most creative and crazy topics. But this time, during my tour through the audiovisual section, I found a subsection of several documentaries and videos about New Zealand. Some of them looked very pale and unattractive, while others had a good selection of colours on the cover or fancy titles that draw the attention of the passerby. Either way, I found myself walking down the aisle in order to check out my acquisition: Kiwi Country New Zealand Best Selling Scenic Documentary Covering The North and South Islands. General impact: unimpressed. I feel faulty to say this, but Kiwi documentaries really need to step up in their quality and presentation in order to entertain a vaster public. Starting with the poor song choices for the titles screens and languid edition of the whole composition, this DVD was promising a tough time for me and I was not wrong. There I was, chilling on my bed, a beer in hand and some chips on the other side ready to be devoured. I dimmed the lights, pressed play and found this marvellous piece of touristic artwork. The whole look was of the late 80s early 90s and the style of the shooting was below the ground. The frame was shaky, the takes were amateurish, the actors were truly bad, seriously bad; I think I have seen better acting in (SPOILER ALERT: You might be offended by the following words) porn movies and Im betting that the acting gave me indigestion later that day. Nonetheless, and this is a big nonetheless the cultural aspect was decent. They did manage some interesting topics about Maori culture, portrayed their female dances and their haka war cry; there was even a representation of what Maori did when strangers arrived to their colonies. The chief usually went outside of the safe zone of the village in order to get

Escamilla | 2 closer to the strangers and place an offering before their feet (fern leaf in this case) if the strangers accepted the gift, it meant that they came in peace; if not, well things would get really bloody between them. Luckily, this man gracelessly took the leaf off the ground and he got to keep his neck as it was. Additionally, they explained how Maoris adapted to this land when they first came from the Polynesian Islands and how did they used the new resources to their favour. I thought that was pretty cool and partially enjoyed the message behind all that terrible quality. In disregard of the previous negative opinions, this video truly made me realise that I most definitely would love to watch a quirky, 90s documentary about Mayans, Aztecs or Mixtecs. I wonder if they could come to Mxico and start dressing up people as indigenous Mexicans from the good ol Spaniard-free days. I am not sure if I should categorise this documentary in the unexpected humour section or the bad documentaries section inside my mind, but either way, I just want to see the Mexican version as soon as possible and have a few laughs watching the Spaniards meet the Mayans for the first time as they wander into the Mexican jungles of the 1400s. At last I can feel ashamed in front of the library lady as she sees me return this documentary into the box of forgotten doom (book return box) and walk away facing the ground in desperation. Did I learn something about New Zealand? Yes, I did; although, for the amount of stuff I learned from the documentary, I would have wanted to waste much less time trying to find that information. Perhaps a few Internet sites, some journals or articles and a couple of YouTube videos would have been just enough for me. I do not recommend this documentary, but I encourage any of you to take the challenge and resist 3 videos on 1 DVD plus Maori haka performance; good riddance.