Ever since François Truffaut stunned the cinematic world with his autobiographical film The 400 Blows in 1959, a work that portrayed the emotional life of an adolescent with unprecedented insight and realism, national cinemas around the world have seen a proliferating output of coming-of-age films in cinemas beyond that of Hollywood. The reason for this efflorescence is that Truffaut's film heralded a new kind of low-cost, auteur cinema (along with the arrival of the French New Wave) that suited both the purpose and the budgets of filmmakers in countries with more limited financial means than those of Hollywood.

New Zealand has not been exempt from this trend, and there are several compelling reasons for devoting a book to this subject. First, if one looks at the New Zealand-made films on New Zealand stories that have either achieved the greatest success at the national box office, and/or have been selected for prestigious international film festivals and acclaimed by critics, it is striking how many of them are coming-of-age films. Second, these films reveal more about the evolution of cultural identity in this country than any other source of evidence, not only because they depict characters in the process of discovering who they are, or want to become (or want to escape from being), but also because they invite spectators to experience what it feels like, emotionally and imaginatively, to be in that condition. Finally, even though coming- of-age movies constitute one of the most frequent genres of film made in New Zealand, there has, as yet, been no extended study of this genre as a national phenomenon outside of Hollywood. Indeed, there have been few studies anywhere of the coming-of-age film as an important genre in its own right, as distinct from the American ‘teen film,’ which has been studied extensively, but which is not coterminous in any way with the national films that will be studied in this volume.

My aim in writing this book is to suggest that an investigation of the New Zealand coming-of-age film, treated both as a subject in its own right and also as a case study, will not only shed light on this nation's cultural history, but will deepen understanding of the coming-of-age genre as an international phenomenon generally, especially with regard to the important place it occupies in virtually all national cinemas.