Top film award for former local man | Wairarapa News | Local News in Wairarapa

One of New Zealand's notable film- makers, Barry Barclay, is one of five $50,000 Laureate Award winners announced this week. For those around Masterton in the 1960s, they will recall this fledgling film-maker working out of rooms above the Regent Theatre with local PR man Jack Brown.

Barclay's family lived in Opaki Road and he attended St Joseph's College before joining the radio station 2XB in the programmes department.

He teamed up with Jack Brown who was the station's "rurals man" and later Times-Age editor, and the two friends established Visicom, an independent film company, which operated around Wairarapa for some years.

Barclay was brought up on farms in South Wairarapa, leaving at 15 to begin studies for the Catholic priesthood in Australia.

The annual Arts Foundation awards offer the largest cash prize to artists across all forms in New Zealand and is aimed at giving well- established artists a significant financial boost to help them further their careers.

The other winners were composer Jack Body, artist and writer Jack Pule, ta moko specialist Derek Lardelli and glass sculptor Ann Robinson.

Part-Maori, Barclay began making a name for himself when introducing the cultural element into his film-making.

His low-budget Ngati in 1987 was set in a tiny New Zealand coastal town in the late 1940s about a young man struggling to discover his cultural and heritage roots.

His later documentary in 1972 The Town that Lost a Miracle ? the story of Opo the dolphin in the Hokianga harbour ? was made as part of the Survey television series.

A collection of 30-minute, one-off documentaries, some were made in-house and other commissioned from independent producers like Barclay.

At the time, Barclay said that The Town that Lost a Miracle was his first attempt at introducing a Maori element into the mainstream.

"I was searching for a resolution by way of values I hardly knew at the time."

The documentary revealed to New Zealanders that the dolphin was in fact murdered and not in an accidental death as has previously believed.

In 1974, he directed six episodes of Tangata Whenua ? The People of the Land which became a landmark television series.

Through the programme's radical conceit of allowing the participants to speak in their own time, there were prolonged silences which according to Barclay only added to the vitality of the programmes.

He has continued the Maori cultural thread in all his work and in 2000 was awarded the Premier Film Award for his Feathers of Peace at the NZ Media Peace Awards.