Vincent Ward is one of New Zealand's pre-eminent filmmakers, lauded both at home and internationally for the quality of his compelling and original vision. Ward originally trained as a fine artist, and his strong visual sensibility has always been recognised as one of the defining features of his films. It is this skill as an image maker that is the genesis for this book, which sets out to collect together the remarkable images that form the heart of Vincent Ward's films. Beginning with his most recent film Rain of the Children, which builds on his groundbreaking documentary In Spring One Plants Along, made between 1978-1981, the book covers all of his feature films, including Vigil, The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey, Map of the Human Heart, What Dreams May Come, and River Queen. While the images in Lives Lived stand on their own. Vincent Ward has added another significant layer to this book by writing a fascinating and revealing text to accompany the photographs, that explains much of how and why these films were made, and the themes that interest and motivate him. This book is about the search to stay whole through making films: of being inspired by the people you work with and make films about, those who offer a lodestone for living. By seeing into the lives of some of the people I have thought above, perhaps in seeing these lives it is easier to see more clearly into my own. Vincent Ward is one of the great creative figures of our generation, whose films have had an enduring influence on the way we see ourself in this country. Lives Lived is an appropriately powerful contribution to that legacy.