Event Manager

Tania: I’m Tania Hakaraia and I’m the festival co-ordinator.

Well the part of it, pretty much anything that needs doing Libby passes on to me I will do but concentrating this year mostly on the ticketing, getting our ticketing up and running. Liaison with the schools, with the community, volunteers, volunteers, this is our first year of using the volunteer system and so co-ordinating that, so we can find out what roles we actually need volunteers for.

It’s been a lot more than last year, during festival week probably from about five in the morning through until 10 at night by the time I clear emails again, and the lead-up to the festival, there’s just been weeks of it really.

I got involved, well, my husband is Libby’s cousin and a couple of years ago, a few years now she made a little film out on our marae called ‘The Lawnmower Men of Kapu’. And then got taken to the Wairoa Film Festival, so we went to Wairoa, Pat and I and a couple of friends and that was our first experience of an international film, well any film festival. So we spent the time up there and came back and said that was so neat, getting to see this especially short films that we don’t see we should have one in Otaki. In the mean time Libby is doing a lot of travelling overseas and they’re saying to her ‘When is New Zealand going to have an indigenous film festival?’

As your kids grow up you participate in all sorts of things. I used to be involved with horse shows years ago when I was young, so you know the ins and outs of various things that need to be done, but one thing that helped us or helped me tremendously was we were invited over to the Imaginative Film Festival in Canada last year. Jason the executive director he said ‘Look if you guys can get here we’ll look after you’ and they gave us access. They gave us access to the films, we could talk to people, we could just get the whole feel of it, we were able to go along to various meetings – there’s quite a lot of meetings that go on while they’re there, meet up with people, talk and find out that way, so that helped tremendously for this year.

I think it’s enthusiasm, time, dedication, just don’t expect to get a lot of money out of it cos there’s not, yeah, just, communication is the biggest thing, which is really what filmmaking is about isn’t it. And dedication and passion, at my age I’ve discovered something new that I’m, I’m loving.