Nova Paul (Te Uriroroi, Te Parawhau, and Te Māhurehure ki Whatitiri, Ngāpuhi) is a Tāmaki-based filmmaker, whose filmmaking practice weaves matauranga Māori and her Ngāpuhi whakapapa with early cinematic and experimental film processes. A materially led practice, Paul’s recent black-and-white 16mm films engage a process of hand-developing with plants, using the leaves of the rakau that are her film’s subjects to create a film developer. 

Her latest 16mm film currently showing at the Arts House Trust at Pah Homestead, Puawānanga, centres around the puawānanga plant both thematically and in the process of making the film itself. Adopting this almost collaborative process with puawānanga, Paul not only visually captures its blossoming within the film – its flowers dancing across the screen and with the wind – but lets the plant give us the image itself, as an act of surrender to the ngahere. What it produces are these beautiful physical imprints of the plant onto the film – the puawānanga etching its aesthetic footprint, creating this super textural element to the work and letting colour bleed through, creating these really beautiful soft blues that reveal themselves throughout, emerging out of the image and back into it – where filmmaking and spirit are intertwined vessels, as a window into revealing the mauri of the plant. 

Sof had a kōrero with Nova Paul about her film Puawānanga and her overall practice