'In keeping with Antipodes's focus on literary and other cultural texts from the Pacific region, this special section features six new essays on Australian and New Zealand fictional feature and documentary films. While Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand are separate and distinct national cinemas, this section's coverage of narrative films from both nations reflects a tradition of scholarship based on the significant cultural crossovers between them. Beyond the nations' common origins as former British colonies and their Pacific location, Australian and New Zealand filmmakers have both drawn on their respective settler histories and postsettler social development as multicultural nations for narrative subjects and inspiration. Ian Conrich has noted that "Australian and New Zealand cinema share a use of powerful landscapes, they also share a post-settler Gothic, a cinema of isolation and travel, similar screen representations of masculinity, and similar fictional depictions of small-town communities" (5). An expanded list of commonalities includes the important rise since the early 2000s of Indigenous film and filmmakers in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand alike, which Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye called in A Companion to Australian Cinema (2019) a necessary challenge to the previously dominant "uninterrupted whiteness of Australian screen culture" (37).' (Introduction)
