This paper discusses the most recent film made by Maori film-maker Barry Barclay, the 2005 documentary feature The Kaipara Affair, which centres on disputes over fishing rights in the Kaipara harbour in the North Island of New Zealand. It sees the film as a continuation of Barclay’s method of activist filmmaking, which demands that Indigenous communities are represented through cultural modes and forms that extend from within the communities themselves. It also stresses the ways in which Barclay’s filmmaking method revises a number of the traditions of activist documentary filmmaking. The paper will set such discussions within Barclay’s controversial outline of New Zealand as being “one country with two laws”, especially as outlined in his 2005 book Mana Tuturu: Maori Treasures and Intellectual Property Rights. Here, Barclay questions the very structure of New Zealand law and social systems, arguing that they do not provide rights and freedom for the country’s Indigenous minority. Instead he proposes that core Maori concepts revolving round guardianship and customary law are used to properly safeguard Maori concerns. The paper will end with an examination of the controversy that surrounded the re-cutting of The Kaipara Affair for its screening on national television, seeing the event as symptomatic of the cultural tensions that exist in New Zealand over the representation of Maori activism.