Four true New Zealand great artists, Brian Brake, James K Baxter, John Drawbridge and Douglas Lilburn will feature in a TVNZ documentary Aspiring that is truly a tale of 'forgotten silver' - a lost film, a lost script and a life-changing expedition by some of our greatest creative minds. The all-star team intended to make a radical new type of film - a cinematic poem that exploded post-War conventions - while filming a dangerous ascent of Mt Aspiring.

Image: Brian Brake shooting a cinematic poem on Mt Aspiring. Four true New Zealand great artists, Brian Brake, James K Baxter, John Drawbridge and Douglas Lilburn will feature in a TVNZ documentary Aspiring that is truly a tale of 'forgotten silver' - a lost film, a lost script and a life-changing expedition by some of our greatest creative minds. The all-star team intended to make a radical new type of film - a cinematic poem that exploded post-War conventions - while filming a dangerous ascent of Mt Aspiring.

Image: Brian Brake shooting a cinematic poem on Mt Aspiring.Aspiring, by the Gibson Group, imagines six stormy weeks in 1949 that bore incredible fruit. The programme picks up the trail in the new light of post-War New Zealand, travelling the rough roads round Lake Wanaka and into the fabled Matukituki Valley. Led by internationally renowned photographer, Brian Brake, the team included poet James K Baxter, composer Douglas Lilburn and visual artist John Drawbridge - all were the best in their field in decades to come.

The all-star team intended to make a radical new type of film - a cinematic poem that exploded post-War conventions - while filming a dangerous ascent of Mt Aspiring.

'Brian Brake had a big vision for this new colour film as a piece of art' says producer Gary Scott, 'but he was stumped by the weather. So after six weeks they went home, the film wasn't finished and I assume it lay on a shelf. Not long after that, his lead actor was killed in plane crash and Brake himself became disillusioned with the National Film Unit (NFU) and left the country.'

So Brake's film, also entitled 'Aspiring', was never completed, never archived, and has been missing for 50 years.

'When you look at the calibre of the team that he was taking, you realise how extraordinary the finished 'Aspiring' could have been if finished' says Scott. 'NFU productions in the 40s were often very stilted, with terrible dialogue acting or copying the old BBC news reel. But Brake had a very good eye, great visual style and James K Baxter to write a verse script for him.'

Baxter and Brake did some other work together, but nothing quite like the landmark that Aspiring was meant to be.

The only living member of the artistic team (at time of filming) was John Drawbridge - the celebrated Wellington artist who as a teenager was commissioned to paint colour storyboards to help sell Brake's grand vision.

Like Baxter, Brake and Lilburn, the deep valleys and chiselled peaks of the Aspiring region had a deep impact on Drawbridge's later work as a painter of landscapes. Returning to the Matukituki for the filming of the documentary brought back many memories and influences.

'John particularly, was trying to illustrate the feel of the land, almost to look inside it and pull out the essence. And when you examine his later works, and that of Brake, Baxter and Lilburn, they focus on the New Zealand landscape and what it meant not to be 'English' - that's where a lot of the power of their work lies.'

The script for the documentary was written by Wellington City Gallery Curator Gregory O'Brien, a long time friend of John Drawbridge, who first heard about the trip and the lost footage while interviewing Drawbridge for a book. O'Brien describes the trip as 'a point of artistic origin' for the artists.

'When we started making the programme' says Scott, 'we knew there was a great connection between the artists, the land, the post-War artistic bloom, and New Zealand identity. We didn't know if we were ever going to find the footage, or the script, so that was going to be the icing on the cake.'

Even in 1949, Douglas Lilburn was well on the way to becoming New Zealand's most celebrated classical composer. His best known works include Landfall In Unknown Seas, the Drysdale Overture, and his three symphonies. He was also a pioneer of sampled electronic sounds.

Cinematographer and director Brian Brake became a celebrated photographer, working for the Magnum agency with Henri Cartier Bresson photographing 20th century icons like Chairman Mao and Pablo Picasso, and travelling extensively through India to shoot one of the great photo essays, Monsoon.

Many of the lines from the rediscovered script were reworked into one of James K Baxter's best known pieces, Poem In The Matukituki Valley. Throughout his career Baxter dealt with land as a force in its own right, and placing characters in the land as he did in his play, Jack Winter's Dream.

In the programme, John Drawbridge looks back on a lifetime of achievement at the highest level of New Zealand visual arts, in which the post war trip has played a major part of his consciousness. Some of John's most famous work includes his 10-panel landscape mural for New Zealand House, and another major installation in the Beehive.

Says Drawbridge' it was one of the most important experiences in my life.'

Even renowned mountaineer George Low, Ed Hillary's good mate on Everest in 1953, was a member of the group. Lowe worked with a group of alpine pioneers that included Harry Stevenson and Ed Cotter. Their skills proved especially useful when Baxter fell into the swollen river.

With some scenes shot on film, the documentary is part biography, part history, part art - a reconstruction of a time when creative New Zealanders were trying to define themselves and their country.

Aspiring will screen on Sunday night, on TV One, in May or June. To receive an e-mail alert when the screening date is confirmed, write to aspiring@gibson.nz