Eight writer-director teams present eight stories about First Nation struggles in New Zealand and Australia.
In 2017, a terrific little movie came out called Waru.
Eight stories from mostly first-time Māori women directors were each told in one shot, and linked by the theme of a tragic death.
The 2019 follow-up Vai, with women directors from all over the Pacific, was almost as good.
Kāinga, made by Asian-Kiwi filmmakers, made its debut at last year's film festival. As did another portmanteau film from ten indigenous filmmakers from both New Zealand and Australia. It's called We Are Still Here.
Unlike Waru, We Are Still Here doesn't have the focus that one shot - and possibly a stronger script editor - gives a film.
There are eight stories here, but we often intercut between them, with mixed results.
What you gain by all those suspenseful cliffhangers you lose as you try and follow some quite different stories.
The running theme in this film is the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook's first landfall here, and each story offers very different perspectives on two and a half centuries of colonialism.
The first is the most free form. A pre-European mother and daughter fish a giant 18th-century tall ship out of the ocean. Through semi-animation, the story crosses centuries before its resolution.
Another story is set in the war-torn Ureweras where mother and father struggle with their wilful daughter over the best way to deal with the white invaders. War or peace?
And out in the Alice Springs desert, a lost European farmer asks the local tribe for help and gets more than he bargained for.
Least-expected in this collection is a story set in 2274 - and it seems that 500 years after James Cook visited the same issues are tackled as badly as before.
We are still here is clearly the work of eight separate production teams. Each story looks and feels quite different.
Some are mythic, some are clearly angry and political.
And like Australia's and New Zealand's often controversial national days, the feelings generated depend very much on what side of the fence you live.
Predictably there's one story set in 1981 - the divisive Springbok Tour protests - mostly told inside a police paddy-wagon, and later a jail.
But there's an interesting angle - the point of view is a young, confused Australian man, who actually came here to find his absentee Māori father.
The story that's caught the most attention is "Uniform" made by a Samoan production team. Set in Gallipoli 1917, it's about a young Samoan soldier, left alone in the trenches, who makes friends with a young Turkish soldier.
They swap uniforms for fun, and only when they're separated do they realise how similar two people from opposite sides of the world can look.
Is there an allegory here? Their experiences and their reasons for being there are quite different.
But in a way, the fact that it's a small, human story is why it appeals just as much as a bigger one.
