Subtitled Stories and Images from The Antipodes, Edge of the Earth is a lavish coffee table production diary for the first three features by maverick New Zealand film-maker Vincent Ward. Cast in much the same vein as Derek Jarman's brilliant The Last of England, it's a blend of family reminiscence, inspiration and journal of oft troubled production.

In Spring One Plants Alone (1981) is a small-scale documentary of the life of an old Maori woman, Puhi, and her middle-aged 200 pound paranoid schizophrenic son, Niki. For the young director (barely in his twenties) the making of this intimate portrait of domestic niceties in extraordinary circumstances becomes subject to an intense blurring of barriers, sucked as he is into the lives of these people and yet simultaneously desperate to at least maintain a semblance of objectivity. The claustrophobia and isolation he encounters in the Maori community clearly have a profound psychological effect, and Puhi's eventual death is a simply told, deeply affecting moment, the whole underscored by Miles Hargest's stunning black and white stills.

The effect of Ward's abandonment was to send him in search of his own complex family history (German-Jewish mother, Antipodean father) for his narrative debut, Vigil (1984), the story of a young girl growing up in a remote Catholic community tinged by the almost unspoken sense of the greater global events moving about them. Punctuated with more of Hargest's powerful images, Ward draws upon his own past life growing up as a child on a farm, searching for the poignancy and drama inherent in the fatherless girl's seclusion in the valley with her grandfather and the mysterious stranger who provides a tense, vital sexual tension between mother and daughter. Vigil has a chillingly bleak, dream-nightmare quality that despite a certain naivety always remains above the prosaic.

That film lead directly to a visit to his roots in Germany and to his aunt in London, which provided Ward with the quintessence of his third film project, the epic The Navigator - A Medieval Odyssey (1988), shot in Australia. A Cumbrian village beset by The Plague finds salvation in the visions of a young boy who leads a band of copper miners on a quest through the very core of the earth and out again into a contemporary New Zealand, where destiny must be fulfilled by erecting a cross upon a church spire before dawn. Ward's sense of the Medieval and the confusion of confronting the modern as an alien is perfectly encapsulated in the film, here told in its original concept as the manuscript of a monk bereft of faith and bewildered by circumstance. This is the most powerful visual section of the volume, littered with stills by Geoffrey Short, and providing the only colour shots, much as the film shifts strikingly with the travellers' arrival in the here and now. Grainy monochrome close-ups of faces, or the silhouettes of the spire inspire awe, topped by the memory of the book's most astounding image - that of the simple miners' boat confronted in an estuary by the apocalyptic vision of a sleek black nuclear submarine.

Ward's telling of the trials and tribulations of his movies is equalling fascinating, particularly the harsh weather and financial conditions that once sank the entire Navigator project. And the welcome commercial success of his latest - the spectacular, transcontinental love story Map of the Human Heart, clearly influenced by his family's military history and itself brimming with the most arresting imagery - has proved there is an audience for his unfailing eye and consummate sense of the epic and mystical, and for anyone charged with a love for his films, Edge of the Earth is a visually captivating, emotionally potent essential.