This article highlights the difficulties and implications of attempts to build legitimacy for state-funded cinema. Through a framing analysis of political debates and policy developments in New Zealand, and informed by international concepts and perspectives from critical and cultural policy studies, it examines the discourses employed to justify offering public funds to New Zealand filmmakers, from the 1960s through to the late 2000s. By tracing the emergence and subsequent institutionalisation of cultural nationalism as a policy frame, the author explains how the New Zealand government came to fund, and justify its support of, the production of fictional films. While this frame has continued to legitimate cultural policy, it has had to make room for the discourse of economic rationalism, which undermines traditional justifications for film funding. Recent ‘creative industries’ discourse has not effectively reconciled these competing narratives. An inclusive and deliberative reframing process would be needed to institute a more widely supported legitimating discourse for publicly funded cinema.
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