If Vigil is distinctive in the extent of its deployment of art-film style in a coming-of-age film, Merata Mita's Mauri (1988) is equally distinctive as an example of ‘Fourth Cinema’ – that is, a wholly indigenous approach to the genre. The concept of ‘Fourth Cinema’ was devised by Mita's fellow Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay (1944–2008) to describe a form of filmmaking that aimed to create, produce, and transmit the stories of indigenous people, and in their own image. Barclay devised the term to distinguish indigenous cinema from Hollywood, art-house, and Third World cinema, expounding this theory in Our Own Image, a short book published in 1990. In it, he argued that every culture has a right and responsibility to present its own culture to its own people in ways that answer to its own values and needs. To achieve such an ideal of indigenous filmmaking, Barclay argues, requires a Māori film, for example, to be one that is ‘made by Māori’ for Māori, with Māori technicians and Māori actors. It also means resisting ‘Pākehā plots’ when devising a script, given that these inevitably reflect a different value system.

Merata Mita (1942–2010) held a view of, and adopted an approach to, filmmaking that entirely matched Barclay's precepts. The first Māori woman to produce, write the script for, and direct a fiction feature film, and perhaps the first indigenous woman to do so anywhere in the world, Mita considered that by the 1930s the screen had been colonized in New Zealand through the imposition of western perspectives and stereotypes on the Māori people, from the first melodramas made by the Frenchman Gaston Méliès, such as Loved by a Maori Chieftess (1913), through the American director Alexander Markey's Hei Tiki (1935), which many Māori view as culturally offensive. For Māori, Mita avers, ever since images of Māori people were first captured by the camera in early colonial days, the reproduced image had mana (spiritual power, prestige), meaning that the image is endowed with a sacred aspect. For this reason, a film that shows Māori people is regarded as a taonga (cultural treasure), and must be treated accordingly. When a film about Māori is screened in a Māori context, Mita says, the Māori audience ‘can find, and themselves express, the spiritual element underscoring our physical world.’