We Are Still Here, a film created and co-produced by Screen Australia and the New Zealand Film Commission with Indigenous Australian, Māori and Pasifika film teams, has won the Dramatic Feature Award at the imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival.

Renae Maihi, a Māori from the Ngāpuhi and Te Arawa tribes, was a writer-director on the film.

Maihi said the recognition was meaningful given the challenges the film faced with the pandemic.

"The film is a story that tells 1000 years of our history, from our perspective, and the impacts that the coming of settlers had upon our people and how our lives changed," she said.

"It's a story of survival and resilience.

Maihi, the only female Māori director to have had two films at the Toronto International Film Festival said it had taken years of struggle to find this level of success.

"When I first started as a storyteller, writer-director in this industry, I was one of the only few Māori woman directors and I remember feeling like it just really lacked women, and we needed more women, we needed more Indigenous women," she said.

"Your pain and our resilience and our survivorship throughout this really challenging period of hundreds of years is valid, and it was hard, and your tears and the tears of our ancestors matter.

"For non-Indigenous audiences, I think it gives voice to our pain and our resilience, and also brings truth and reality to what happened to us as First Peoples."

"It's really hard to connect with those ideas if you're not Indigenous, but when you're in a cinema and you're now following the perspective of a character who is struggling with human issues... you get the opportunity to walk in their shoes with them."