Merata Mita was born on 15 June 1942 in Maketu, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand, of Māori (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāi Te Rangi, Whakatōhea) and Pākehā descent.
Merata Mita was born on 15 June 1942 in the small coastal town of Maketu in the Bay of Plenty region of New Zealand's North Island. She was of Māori descent, affiliated with the iwi (tribes) Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāi Te Rangi, and Whakatōhea, with some Pākehā (European) ancestry as well.
Her upbringing in a rural Māori community during the 1940s and 1950s, a period of significant social change and urban migration for Māori people, would deeply inform her later work as a filmmaker and activist. Growing up steeped in Māori culture, language, and communal values gave her a distinctive lens through which she would later view and critique mainstream New Zealand society and its media representations of indigenous people.
This grounding in Māori identity became the foundation for her groundbreaking career, as she would go on to become the first indigenous woman in the world to write and direct a feature film, and one of the most important voices in Fourth World and indigenous cinema. Her birth in Maketu placed her within a lineage of storytelling and oral tradition that she would translate into the visual medium of film decades later.