The coming-of-age films examined in this book could almost serve as a compendium of the most esteemed and successful films to be made in New Zealand, attesting to the vitality and creative inventiveness of what is still a relatively young industry. More importantly, they reveal how films in this genre serve a unique function in the processes of national identity formation because their mass appeal to a national audience turns them into a conduit for a collective experience. Rugby, a national passion, is the only other cultural phenomenon that can lay claim to anywhere near the same status as an experience that is shared by so many people, but the fantasies it elicits are far more limited than those solicited by the imaginative representations of experience presented in coming-of-age films.

One also sees that New Zealand coming-of-age films have this draw-card appeal because they hold up a mirror in which New Zealanders can recognize who they are in relation to who they have been in the past, and who they might wish to become in the future. Films in this genre serve this function more effectively than those of any other genre because it is intrinsic to their very nature that they show young people in a process of becoming as these individuals respond to cultural, socio-economic, and political circumstances that produce effects threatening their happiness. Given the personal investments and projection on the part of the filmmaker that almost invariably shape the films, they are always anchored in a reality that is recognizable, and one that is always shared by members of the audience because of its closeness in chronological time to the circumstances that produced the impulse to make the film in the first place.

The very fact that these films identify and address threats to the happiness of young people in the process of becoming, usually with at least an implicit suggestion of how these threats might be overcome, makes coming-of-age films an invaluable indicator of how a society is evolving over time. In the case of New Zealand cinema, a number of significant shifts can be observed that reflect social changes since the post-Second World War period.