At the outset of this book, I feel a need to explain why I wrote it. New Zealand cinema as a coherent creative industry with a regular output is a fairly recent phenomenon, and New Zealanders tend to underestimate its achievement and significance (possibly as a result of vestigial, post-colonial ‘cultural cringe’). I want to counter this habitual reaction by pointing to the insights that New Zealand cinema can provide as to the forces that have influenced the formation of our national character(s). I am also aware of a growing interest in World Cinema, and of the cinema of small nations and post-colonial societies in particular. This book is intended to place New Zealand cinema in the mix of national cinemas available for viewing and for study, both for students and scholars, and for the general public. Finally, after an academic career spanning forty years, I have realized, in retrospect, that I have lived through some of the critically formative moments in the development of New Zealand's cultural identity/identities since the Second World War, and that the coming-of-age films I analyze in this book reflect the nature of those changes.

In many respects, this book is a companion work to my earlier Ship of Dreams (2008), which traced the consequences of New Zealand's value systems and cultural practices in the emotional lives of adult men. While this earlier book often touched, given its focus on masculinity, on the coming-of-age experiences of boys, it largely bypassed the experience of girls and women, and did not cover the full spectrum of the formative influence on children of the local cultural environments. This book fills in that gap, especially given that New Zealand coming-of-age films engage with, and are virtually inseparable from, many of the most iconic works of New Zealand literature. For this reason, my discussion of each major film includes an analysis of the novel upon which it is based where this occurs, which is in all cases except four films that are based on original scripts.

I should also add that this corpus of coming-of-age films provides an invaluable source of evidence of cultural changes in New Zealand that historians tend to overlook. Accordingly, in approaching each of the films discussed in this volume, I have tried to point to the historical significance of the representations they imaginatively depict.