Rangi Point Pictures — Born of the Hokianga

Stories from the Meeting Place of Two Worlds

Where the land speaks and the spirit answers. Te ao wairua and te ao mārama — the world of spirit and the world of light — lived at once. These are films about seeing our own lives, and the sacred held inside them.

Te Take — Why We Tell Stories

Nō hea koe?

Nō hea koe? Where are you from? It is the first thing we ask one another — and a whole life can open inside the answer.

We make films so that people might go back to their own: their family, their struggle, the journey that carried them here — and come to know those stories as their own. And so that someone whose story we don't yet know might meet us with curiosity rather than judgement, and simply let us speak.

There is a richness in every person's story. We are here to honour it — Māori stories of survival and warmth and searching; my story, my father's story, our story; Rangi and Papa, as they are lived and have always been lived.

"Our hope is simple: that in the dark of the cinema, we might turn to the screen with tears, or a waiata, or a haka, and say: that is my story."
The Rangi Point Ethos

Te Miro o te Moana

The whirlpool at the mouth of the ocean — where the physical and spiritual worlds are woven together.

"A ritual is the enactment of a myth," wrote Joseph Campbell. Like the Mass, like the whare tūpuna, a film can be that enactment — carrying us to a middle time, where the ancestors and the living stand in the same room. This is the water we work in: te ao Māori and the life of the spirit, turning together. Te reo Māori is not a subtitle here — it is the heartbeat.

01

The Right Story

We choose stories not for what glitters, but for what is true, what is needed, and what has waited a long time to be told.

02

The Right People

Kaumātua guidance and community aren't brought in at the end — they are here from the first word. Cultural integrity is woven through the work, not added on.

03

The Two Worlds

The world we walk in, and the world of wairua that breathes through the land and our tūpuna — te ao mārama and te ao wairua, lived at once. Our stories live where those two worlds meet.

04

Story Sovereignty

Māori stories, told from the inside, and held by the people whose lives, language and land they come from.

Ngā Kiriata — The Slate

Six Films. One Kaupapa.

The Mystery — Short Films
Showdown
Key art in development
Active Development

Showdown

Short Film · Te Reo Māori · Waiōhau, Tūhoe Country

Waiōhau, 1960s. Three Māori boys cross a haunted stretch of road on a moonless night. Haka's courage is borrowed — the swagger of a cinema gunslinger he'll never be. But when the dark demands the real thing, borrowed courage fails. What he discovers in its place is older than any film he's ever seen, and it comes to him by breath and by contact, not by instruction.

Cultural Anchor — Jonas Haare-Taoho
Hongi — key art
Active Development

Hongi

Short Film · Te Reo Māori / Spanish · Hokianga

A Hokianga football coach inherits a whakataukī from his grandfather — that a real relationship can exist across oceans, held together by nothing more than a photograph and the will to believe it. The photograph is from Uruguay, 1967. The grandfather is gone. What the coach must decide is whether the old man was right — and whether he is willing to find out.

Cultural Anchor — Jonas Haare-Taoho
The High-Stakes Dramas — Features
Just Football
Key art in development
In Development

Just Football

Feature Film · NZ–UK Co-production · ~NZ$6.6M

Aroha Alice Marupo fights her way into the men's professional game and is rebranded simply "Alice." The name is a contract. When her father's love — carried in a jar of shells from the shore of her childhood — finds her in the tunnel before the biggest game of her career, she has to decide what she is willing to answer to.

The Technical Area — key art
In Development

The Technical Area

Feature Film · Dunedin · Football · Drama

When a Kāi Tahu coach still unsure of his own identity at the wrong end of his career takes a last posting in Dunedin, he inherits a squad nobody wanted and a city that has stopped believing. What he builds is less a football team than a reckoning — with the city, with himself, and with the question of whether a man can finally come home to something he was never sure was his.

Get Ted
Key art in development
In Development

Get Ted

Feature Film · Comedic Crime · Aotearoa

A botched extraction, a very wrong address, and New Zealand's most iconic footballer — who has absolutely no interest in being rescued. What was supposed to be a clean job becomes a cross-country fever dream in which three cousins discover that getting Ted is the least of their problems. Keeping him is the job. And Ted has opinions.

The Spiritual Epics — Features
Incarnation — key art
In Development — Lead Title

Incarnation

Feature Film · Historical Drama · Hokianga / Rome · 1859–1862

1859. A Māori youth is taken from the Hokianga by Bishop Pompallier to study for the priesthood at Rome's Pontifical Urban College. From the misted shores of home to the marble courtyards of the Church, he must wrestle with the collision of faith, culture and belonging — before he can find his way back.

The Architect
Laurie Kerr-Bell, Hokianga, c. 1955
Laurie Kerr-BellHokianga, c. 1955
The man the films come from.
Richard
Kerr-Bell
Writer · Director · Producer
Ngāpuhi · Te Rarawa · Te Aupōuri · Ngāti Kuri
Born of the Hokianga. Based in Wellington.
"A film should carry a deep stillness and the moral fury of The Mission — but above all it must know whose land it stands on, and whose story it is telling. I'm looking for the story that has been waiting to be told, and the people brave enough to tell it with me."

Rangi Point Pictures began with a son recording his father's stories. In writing Laurie's life — and the feature that traces that journey, All the Places in Between — Richard met a story of quiet struggle and a long fight for dignity, and knew it had to reach the screen.

Richard Kerr-Bell holds a PhD in Māori Catholic identity from the University of Otago, a Master of Counselling, and over a decade of experience teaching religious education, te reo Māori, and school counselling across Aotearoa's secondary schools. He lectures on Māori spirituality at Te Kupenga Catholic Theological College, and serves as Director of Mission at Sacred Heart College, Lower Hutt.

His published work includes From Rangi Point in Bare Feet — his father Laurie's biography — and the forthcoming scholarly text Being Māori, Being Catholic — E Kore e Piri te Uku ki te Rino, currently under review at Huia Publishers. He authored the Māori elements of Tō Tātou Whakapono — Our Faith, the new national Catholic RE curriculum, using conceptual rather than literal translation — protecting the integrity of te reo and allowing the gift of God's Spirit within Māori culture to speak with full force.

His board history includes roles at New Zealand Football, Wellington Phoenix FC, Otago Hockey, Te Kupenga Catholic Theological College, and Te Hau Ora. His 25+ years of football coaching experience, including senior Māori national team roles, gives the sport-centred films in the Rangi Point slate their authentic interior life.

The themes that drive his work — inheritance and courage, the land as witness, the meeting of Māori and Catholic worlds, what legacy parents leave their children — are not researched. They are known.

Te Tikanga o te Kiriata — How We Work

Craft, Culture, and Precision

Te Reo

The Heartbeat, Not the Subtitle

Te reo Māori is structural in every production — not deployed for authenticity, but because these stories live in it. Dialect, whakapapa, and register are held by the communities the films are set in.

Tikanga

Built In, Not Bolted On

Kaumātua guidance and community come first — before a camera is ever picked up, not after the edit. This is how the integrity of a story is kept whole.

Mana

Story Sovereignty

Intellectual property stays with the people whose lives, language, and land are the story. Rangi Point Pictures works in partnership — never extraction. The story is found by listening, and it stays held.

Whakapā Mai

We're building a whānau of storytellers

If these stories speak to something you carry too — if you have your own story, or your people's, waiting to be told — we would love to hear from you. Nō hea koe? Tell us where you're from.

rangipoint@icloud.com