Martin Rumsby

Martin Rumsby (d. 2022) had an extensive career as a filmmaker, writer, exhibitor and distributor.

"An anthropologist of the heart." — Mike Hoolboom

In the 1980s, he toured a programme of local Super 8mm film works around North America, also collecting works by American filmmakers. Prior to this he was part of Alternative Cinema, the Auckland Filmmakers Cooperative, whose more formal successor would become the Moving Image Centre in Auckland.

His more recent works made reference to canonical experimental film works from the North American avant-garde, or reprised small gauge film material shot in North America in the 1980s; for example, I read the news today (1987/2019). From the mid-2010s onwards, he produced a number of short diaristic works under the series title Manurewa Newsreel. Most of these documented day-to-day encounters with people in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland (with a particular focus on the suburb of Manurewa). Later, his work focussed on scenes of people at work and leisure in his adopted home of Ho Chi Minh City.