Newly preserved Nambassa Festival returns to NZIFF after 46 years

About the film

In the summer of 1979, on a farm near Waihī, 60,000 hippies gathered at the annual Nambassa Music and Alternative Lifestyles Festival for three days of peace, love, spiritual growth, and of course music. Nambassa Festival captures the huge event in all its hazy, countercultural glory, featuring live performances and demonstrations by many artists including Split Enz, Golden Harvest, Schtung, Steve Tulloch, Cockroach, Acorn’s Puppets, Swami Satchidananda, Chapman and White, John Hore-Grenell, Serendipity, Dragon Dance, the Plague, Neville Purvis, Mahana, Rick Steel and the Hot Biscuit Band, Tribrations, Living Force and Limbs Dance Company.

Nambassa Festival was edited from 36 hours of raw footage by English concert film director Phillip Howe, and premiered at the Auckland International Film Festival on July 20, 1980. Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, the audiovisual archive of Aotearoa New Zealand, has supplied a brand-new digital preservation of the film to NZIFF for 2026, restoring its sun-baked visuals and riotous 1970s soundtrack to the highest possible quality.

The Auckland and Wellington sessions will be introduced by special guests.

About the preservation

The original filmmakers spared no expense when shooting Nambassa Festival, which left the Ngā Taonga film preservation team with top quality recordings to build this digital preservation from. Multiple camera crews shot a combined 36 hours of 16mm film, the main stage was rigged with cameras for performer closeups, and aerial shots were taken by helicopter. The concert audio was also excellent, being recorded in full stereo sound that deserves to be experienced in a cinema.

But since its successful initial run, which included showings at Cannes, the feature length cinematic version of Nambassa Festival has not been accessible to audiences. No complete print of the film was available by the time preservation work began at Ngā Taonga in 2026, so our film preservationists were faced with the challenge of digitally reconstructing what audiences would have seen in 1980. Working from pre-print materials and other sources they were able to bring back scenes that were missing for various reasons, restoring the original 100-minute cinematic cut.

As Dr Leslie Lewis, Manager Film Preservation – Poutaki Rokiroki Kiriata at Ngā Taonga explains: “Our preservation philosophy is about returning films to their intended state. We don’t add anything new or improve recordings beyond what was possible at the time they were made. Every element of this digital preservation, including the colour grading, is true to the original – which fortunately for us was beautifully made.”

Nambassa Festival is a film that Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision has long been eager to preserve. With recent advancements in technology, its 4K digital preservation has now become possible. Through working closely with Peter Terry, the festival organiser and rights holder of the film, we’re delighted to bring this unique film back to the big screen.