Renae Maihi


Renae Maihi is a New Zealand film director and screenwriter. Her short films include Mannahatta and Ka Puta Ko Au, and her first feature film, Waru, was released in 2017. In 2018, she launched a petition to strip Bob Jones of his knighthood, and Jones in turn took her to the High Court for defamation, but later withdrew the case.

Life and career

Maihi was born in Auckland, New Zealand. She is Māori of Ngāpuhi and Te Arawa descent.
Maihi made her writing debut with Nga Manurere in 2009. In 2010, she made her screenwriting debut with short film, Redemption, which premiered at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival and Sundance Film Festival. Her play, Patua, won Adam NZ Playwrights award for best play by a Maori Playwright 2013. She subsequently wrote and directed the short film, Butterfly , funded by the New Zealand Film Commission. During 2015, she worked on series 2 of My Kitchen Rules NZ as a regional contestant coordinator. In 2015, her short film, Mannahatta, premiered at ImagineNATIVE Film Festival in Toronto. Manhatta was later selected as a finalist for "Best Short Film" at the New Zealand International Film Festival.
Maihi's feature film, Waru, which she co-wrote and co-directed in collaboration with 8 other Māori women filmmakers. Waru was made up of a series of vignettes which addressed the widespread issue of child abuse in New Zealand. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, won the audience award at Seattle International Film Festival and the grand jury award for an outstanding international narrative feature at the 34th Asia-Pacific Film Festival in Los Angeles. It was also screened at the Wairoa Māori Film Festival.
In 2018, she was awarded the NZFC Maori Screen Excellence Award and Whakapapa Film Festival of Italy Award. Her films were screened as part of a retrospective on Māori filmmakers at Auckland's first Māori Film Week and the New Zealand International Film Festival.

Bob Jones v Renae Maihi

For Waitangi Day in 2018, Bob Jones wrote an opinion piece calling for an annual "Māori Gratitude Day", where among other things he suggested that Māori serve breakfast in bed to Europeans as Māori owe their existence to British migrants. The opinion piece was published in the National Business Review on 2 February and caused so much outrage that it was soon deleted from their website. In response, Maihi started a petition calling for Bob to be stripped of his knighthood and on 27 March 2018, the petition was presented to parliament and received by MPs Kiri Allan and Willie Jackson. In a seven to four majority decision in April 2018, the New Zealand Media Council did not uphold a complaint about the opinion piece, but noted that the National Business Reviews decision to no longer publish columns by Jones was an "appropriate response to the justified public outrage".
In June 2018, Jones filed defamation papers with the Wellington High Court, seeking a ruling that the language used in Maihi's petition defamed him. Also in June 2018, community campaigner Laura O'Connell Rapira started a crowdfunding campaign for Maihi's legal costs. The court hearing was set for 10 to 21 February 2020. In his initial cross examination, Jones admitted that he had never read the petition that he claims defames him.
On 14 February, 2020 Jones withdrew the case.

Filmography

Theatre