Gerd Pohlmann studied film at the DFFB Berlin. It’s where he met New Zealander Chris Strewe. Together they went to NZ for Strewe’s MA-Thesis film: Waitangi – The Story of a Treaty and its Inheritors. This film also features the start of the Bastion Point occupation. Pohlmann returned to NZ and in partnership with Merata Mita made some of the more seminal documentaries of the time: The Bridge, The Hammer & The Anvil. He is presently completing a documentary on New Zealand humanist and socialist politician Jim Anderton, with interviews he captured before Jim’s death in 2018.
The Bastion Point occupation was one of the most important protests in the struggle for Maori land rights in New Zealand. The protest began in 1977 when the government proposed to subdivide Maori land in the Bastion Point region of Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city. The Ngati Whatua tribe resisted these plans and occupied the site for 506 days. This…