What if the past isn't behind you, but in front? This is the provocation at the heart of a Māori proverb — ka mua, ka muri — which holds that what has already happened lies ahead of us, while what is yet to come presents itself from behind. Found also in ancient Greece and Indigenous African thought, this idea is more than a simple inversion. Time, in this understanding, is a sphere — still at its core, yet one within which we rotate, reorienting our temporal perceptions in multiple ways. A literal translation of ka mua, ka muri could be - 'the past in front happens just as what will happen is behind".

Over twenty years of filmmaking, and through recent research with the Vā Moana - Pacific Spaces group at Auckland University of Technology, this idea has become the foundation of a new way of thinking about cinema. Drawing on Oceanic understandings of time and space — the concept of Tā\Vā/Wā — and in conversation with Bergson, Deleuze, Maya Deren, and Mark Fisher, we have been developing cinematic ideas and practices that take this seriously.

The diagram below maps Tā\Vā/Wā (roughly: time/space, and the space-between) in relation to the cinematic cut — the moment of edit where, we argue, something stranger than continuity is possible. This research has led directly to a new feature film, Ghost South Road. At its heart is the same provocation: not simply a reversal of time, but an invitation to reorient.