When we talk about Oceanian or Australiasian cinema, we mainly talk about Australia and New Zealand as these are the countries which dominate the region’s output (At least as far as critical coverage goes. Australia actually made the first feature-length narrative film, The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), widely considered the world’s first feature-length narrative film.

Early films were formulaic. Dominated by “bushranger” outlaw tales, colonial adventures, and rugged landscapes that sought to define a distinct settler identity. However, both industries fell into a long period of industrial dormancy from the 1920s until the 1960s due to British and American imports and minimal local production. This changed in the 1970s and was sparked by aggressive government funding and the establishment of the Australian Film Development Corporation (1970) and the New Zealand Film Commission (1978).

This birthed the “Australian New Wave,” propelling directors like Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock, 1975), George Miller (Mad Max, 1979), and Gillian Armstrong into international prominence by blending high-art sensibilities, historical anxieties, and raw genre filmmaking. Concurrently, New Zealand experienced its own explosion of talent with gritty, low-budget successes like Roger Donaldson’s Sleeping Dogs (1977) and Geoff Murphy’s Goodbye Pork Pie (1981). Crucially, this era also marked a monumental shift from Indigenous peoples being the passive objects of the camera to becoming the creators of their own narratives. In Australia, First Nations perspectives began reshaping the screen, while in New Zealand, trailblazers like Merata Mita (Patu!, 1983) and Barry Barclay (Ngāti, 1987)—the first feature written and directed by a person of Māori descent—established a foundational framework for sovereign Indigenous cinema.

In the 1990s, Oceanian cinema really started to penetrate globally with Jane Campion winning the Palme d’Or for The Piano (1993) and Peter Jackson’s transformation of New Zealand into “Middle-earth” with The Lord of the Rings. Now, Oceania, once a place which got imports and gave nothing, is now fully tied into global cinema, as seen by the prominence of Taika Waititi and Baz Luhrmann.