Ground-Breaking new Documentary filmed at
Tamaki Maori Village – Rotorua
Te Pa - One Land, Two Peoples is a new documentary which will take three modern-day families on the adventure of a lifetime!
A nationwide search was recently undertaken for three families who have now been selected, and will soon travel back in time to 1850s New Zealand, for a ground-breaking new documentary series for Television New Zealand.
The exciting social experiment will air on New Zealand television from June 2009, and follows three families as they travel back to world with no cell phones, cars, laptops, televisions or even electricity!
Two Māori families will live in a traditional Māori Pa and one Pakeha family will live nearby as a working class family might have done in the 1850s. This exciting project will see the three families living in authentic conditions as they would have in 1850s New Zealand for nearly two months.
At the heart of the series will be each family member’s struggle to adapt to subsistence living in a hostile land, at a time in our history when survival was very difficult and where two very different peoples struggled to understand each other.
Portions of the opening episode for this ground breaking new series were filmed at Tamaki Maori Village, in Rotorua, as the families were welcomed and then indoctrinated into the Maori communal and tribal ways of life to prepare them for the weeks ahead.