An Immigrant Nation Documentary

An Immigrant Nation was a prime-time documentary series broadcast between 1995–96 on TV One, during the channel’s weekly ‘Tuesday Documentary’ slot. Produced by Top Shelf Productions with funding from NZ On Air, the series comprised eight one-hour episodes (including commercial breaks) over two seasons. Each episode focused on a specific migrant community in Aotearoa, with two episodes, Footprints of the Dragon (broadcast 24 January 1995) and From Sri Lanka with Sorrow (broadcast 29 December 1996), portraying East and South Asian communities respectively. The series was well received by the public, though not without criticism from the communities involved and the programme makers themselves, who encountered a number of creative and production challenges.

In her 1999 research article ‘Documenting the Immigrant Nation’, Jane Roscoe contextualised the development of the series as occurring on the back of several trends: a move away from monocultural representations of nationhood in the media; an increase in Asian immigration alongside New Zealand’s influence in the Asia–Pacific region; and competing audience objectives between NZ On Air’s commitment to “serve and represent minority communities through mainstream programming” and TVNZ’s increasingly commercial direction as a broadcaster. Summarising these circumstances, she noted:

The Immigrant Nation series was conceived as a direct response to the above changes and was a conscious attempt to present New Zealand as a multicultural society with a rich and diverse cultural heritage. To some extent it was also an exercise in public relations designed to give New Zealand an opportunity to present itself as a nation that welcomes and appreciates ethnic diversity. The series was made and broadcast within a political context in which immigration and ‘race’ were key concerns fuelling heated social and political debates which came to a head during the 1996 Election Campaign...

In 1993 TVNZ agreed to support the series as long as it concentrated on the major immigrant influences in New Zealand society and providing that it was accessible and would appeal to a majority audience…However, although TVNZ supported the series, the relationship between the programme makers and the broadcaster was not an unproblematic one…The biggest disappointment [to the makers] was that the series screened over the summer holidays, January 1995, with little promotion.

Produced in the human-interest programme format, each episode combined narration, interviews, archival material and documentary footage, as well as themes exploring language, history, religion, food and identity formation, to tell the story of individuals within select migrant communities and their extended family and cultural backgrounds. The series also highlighted the migration roots of its participants, with camera crews following family members on return visits to their country of origin. Footprints of the Dragon was a notable example, looking at commuting workers and the difficulties skilled migrants face finding jobs, with some forced to return to their ‘homeland’ for employment despite having permanently relocated their families to Aotearoa.

Chinese New Zealand writer and film critic Helene Wong was invited to direct Footprints of the Dragon, which centred on the Kwoks, a multigenerational Chinese family from Pōneke Wellington, whose arrival from Guangdong province dates to the 1890s; and the Changs and Jens, two Taiwanese families who moved to Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland in the 1990s. Along with documenting the personal experience of these families and their views on life in New Zealand, Wong’s episode addressed both historical racism (the poll tax, xenophobic propaganda) and later anti-Asian sentiments around immigration — or the ‘Asian Invasion’ as it was referred to by the NZ First Party at the time. Interviewed by Roscoe about this approach, Wong elaborated:

[I wanted to] cut across those stereotypes and confront people with the fact that these are actually ordinary human beings who can walk and talk in English and they feel and have opinions in the same way as you or I. We were going to try and cut across that stereotype that these are alien beings.

While other episodes were directed and/or presented by people from the communities in focus — filmmaker Sima Urale, for instance, narrated the episode on Samoan immigrants, Searching for Paradise — this was not a consistent feature of the series. According to Roscoe, NZ On Air specified that An Immigrant Nation “was to be a collaborative project between Top Shelf and the communities” and requested that “where possible crew were to be recruited from these communities,” however in reality “most of the directors had little input into the development of the series…had not conducted the original research…and were contracted once the stories had been set up and the participants chosen.” Roscoe also noted “the issue of sufficient input into the series” was raised a number of times by the communities, while going on to contextualise their concerns against the budget and deadline constraints faced by the producers, and the competing interests of the broadcaster.

Wong’s involvement in pre-production on Footprints of the Dragon, which included research, interviews and selection of the Taiwanese families featured in the episode, was an exception to the contradictions reported by Roscoe. Reflecting on the differences between the industry then and now, she commented:

In the 90s there was virtually no diversity in the screen industry, both in crew and creatives — so to be fair, Top Shelf’s proposal to include collaborators from the community was more aspirational than real. Even I was a rookie director, on my second production. Caterina De Nave, who directed the Italian episode [The Unbroken Thread], was established as a producer but had not directed this genre before. Generally, the other directors had consultants/advisers/narrators from the community.

From Sri Lanka with Sorrow was directed by series editor Anna Cottrell and narrated by journalist Alison Parr — evidently to provide an external voice on the two Sri Lankan families, one Tamil and one Sinhalese, at the heart of the episode. Charting the Mahendran and Jayatilleke families’ migration journeys to Lower Hutt, Wellington, where they both settled after fleeing the Sri Lankan civil war, the episode also looks closely at their religious beliefs. This includes the marriage between a young Tamil couple of Christian and Hindu faiths on the Mahendran’s side, and a trip back to the Sri Lankan city of Kandy by Chandra Jayatilleke to mark the first anniversary of her mother’s death, a significant occasion in Buddhism.

The episode was controversial for TVNZ, with at least one complaint referred to the Broadcasting Standards Authority on the grounds “the programme was unbalanced in its representation of Tamils in Sri Lanka, and contained factual errors.” The complainant, Dr B Balachandran, believed the programme was insensitive to the feelings of Tamils living in Aotearoa:

According to the title of the documentary, I expected it to be a documentary explaining the problems faced by the Sri Lankan immigrants and their contributions to New Zealand. However, the documentary, for certain unexplained reasons delved into the history and current political situation in Sri Lanka and resulted in an ill informed and incorrect version based on Sri Lankan Government’s propaganda heavily biased towards the Sinhalese community.

Across a number of objections, Balachandran outlined that From Sri Lanka with Sorrow favoured the viewpoint of Tamils as aggressors and lacked sufficient interviews from a Tamil perspective, resulting in “the impression that the Sinhalese were a peace loving community and the Tamils were terrorists.” In response, TVNZ argued that “the programme was about the perceptions of the families involved.” Declining to uphold the complaint, the BSA was unable to find any breaches of the Television Code of Broadcasting Practice, stating “the programme makers worked hard to present a balanced view of the situation in Sri Lanka based on the stories of the two families interviewed. The opinions advanced in those circumstances must necessarily view the situation through those families’ perspectives. It was not a current affairs programme.”

Criticism of From Sri Lanka with Sorrow and other episodes in the series often stemmed from issues of representation. Capturing some of this feedback for her research article through focus group discussions, Roscoe’s findings included general praise by viewers who enjoyed “seeing themselves on screen” and “recognising their homeland,” with Chinese and Taiwanese groups appreciating their programme for dealing with “some of the more difficult issues such as racism.” Footprints of the Dragon was also cited by other groups more critical of their own programme as “an example of ‘what could have been’.” Other comments touched on fairness, bias and research credibility in relation to how the communities might be perceived, particularly in terms of stereotyping and othering — both of which Roscoe concluded were key tensions within the making and presentation of An Immigrant Nation.

An Immigrant Nation on NZ On Screen

Watch Footprints of the Dragon

Watch From Sri Lanka with Sorrow