Censor for a day report: Term 1 2010
The Term 1 2010 Censor for a Day event was held in Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin in the last week of March. 326 students (plus their teachers) from 14 schools attended.
Students learnt about New zealand's censorship law
The Chief Censor took the students through an explanation of the different sorts of publications the Office classifies and the criteria used to decide what classification to give to a film. 
They watched the film Daybreakers
The film is a horror/sci-fi action thriller, set ten years into the future, where a virus has turned the majority of the population into vampires. Humans are the minority race, and are hunted and farmed for their blood.
As they watched, students thought about how things such as sex, horror, crime, cruelty and violence were presented in the film.
students applied the classification criteria
Students filled out a form similar to the form used by Classification Officers, and discussed how different things, such as horror and violence, were presented in the film. They also had to take into consideration the likely audience of the film, the dominant effect of the film, whether it had any merit and how watching the film in a cinema might be different from watching it on DVD.
The majority of students classified the film as R16
75% thought that Daybreakers should be classified as R16 due to the horror and violence in the film. Most students also thought that the film's descriptive note should contain a warning about the violence, horror, and offensive language – this matches the classification and the descriptive note given to the film by the Classification Office.
Read the report on the Term 1 2010 Censor for a Day event (PDF, v9.0, 271KB)
A copy of the Classification Office's summary of reasons for the decision on the film Daybreakers is available upon request.
Contact the Information Unit for a copy of the summary
Glossary:
- Pre-release film = A film that has not yet been shown to the New Zealand public
