Once Were Warriors (1994), directed by Lee Tamahori, and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), directed by Zacharias Kunuk, are both Indigenous films adapted from Indigenous source materials: Alan Duff 's novel Once Were Warriors (1990), and an Inuit Traditional Story, respectively. These films were made a world away from each other, at the bottom of the southern hemisphere in Aotearoa New Zealand and the top of the northern hemisphere in Nunavut, and they present starkly different worlds: an impoverished and dispossessed Māori community in late-twentieth-century Auckland; and a sixteenth-century Inuit community in Igloolik and beyond. The pairing of these two adaptations demonstrates a range of Indigenous narratives and filmmaking practices.

Despite the vast differences in geography, territory, narrative and language, however, Once Were Warriors and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner share key features of production, circulation and reception. Both films were made with a large proportion of Indigenous crew members: ‘half the crew’ of Once Were Warriors were Māori, according to its director (Tamahori 1995, 27); and all but the director of photography for Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner were Inuit. Both films were landmarks of the cinemas of the respective settler-colonial nation-states that claim them: Once Were Warriors was the highest-grossing film of Aotearoa New Zealand at that point; Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, the first feature film entirely in Inuktitut, was the highest-grossing Canadian film in 2002. That both films also found success on the international festival and art-house circuit further testifies to their dual audiences at home and abroad, although ‘at home’ audiences do not simply encompass the nation-state. Pākehā viewers in Aotearoa New Zealand and ‘Southern’ viewers in Canada are not insider audiences for these films. Both films either minimise or eschew the presence of white people: for Once Were Warriors, this near-excision runs counter to the source text of Duff 's novel; for Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, the historical narrative dictates this absence. Both films also alter their source material, most significantly in the narratives’ respective endings. Questions of fidelity in relation to film adaptation are internal rather than external to the Indigenous communities relevant to these projects, in contrast to the adaptations examined in the previous chapter: changes are not imposed by non-Indigenous screenwriters and filmmakers.