Kāinga (2022)

The closing night for the Melbourne Women in Film Festival was actually a film from New Zealand, but focusing strongly on diasporan peoples making their home in that country and the challenges that await. It’s as much about creating a future that doesn’t exist, I suppose, as in reflecting some kind of existing multicultural society (as I think NZ is a fair way away from that), but it’s great to see the work on show. I hope some of these filmmakers go on to make their own feature films; I’d love to see them.

---

I’m not sure this quite hits as hard as the same producers’ earlier portmanteau collections, Waru and Vai, but that’s not to say it’s not great. Indeed, it’s a wonderful tribute to the diversity of filmmaking culture in Aotearoa — or at least, potential filmmaking culture, as I don’t think the small number of films that the country makes each year really fully embraces that yet, but I certainly wish it would. Whereas the previous film Vai went to locations around the Pacific Islands to find stories that were united through the focus on the water, on the connective threads between them, Kāinga is grounded (literally) in the soil of a single home in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, specifically the southern suburb of Māngere.

The film is split into eight segments moving through the years, taking in each decade from the 1970s onwards, before moving forward in shorter increments, as families from different ethnicities move in, the changes in the families and the changes in the home tracking the changes in society, in aspirations and expectations, and the way that things come full circle. It’s about an idea of New Zealand that I still don’t think is fully part of society there, but is something I think it is working towards a bit better than some other countries (albeit haltingly, as we perceive a little in a later segment of the film, where the home is owned by a racist pākehā couple), of embracing cultural difference as a generative source, and a positive one, but it’s comforting to see it in film.

Not all the individual segments fully work on their own (as is natural for any film of this nature), but the vision is consistent, the work of the set designers and actors and all the filmmakers is impressive in just getting it done (all these 10-minute unbroken takes is a flex, carried over from Waru), and most of all it’s a model and an inspiration, I hope, for future indigenous and pan-Asian filmmaking.

CREDITS
Directors Michelle Ang, Ghazaleh Golbakhsh غزاله گلبخش, Nahyeon Lee, Angeline Loo, Hash Perambalan [as “HASH”], Asuka Sylvie, Yamin Tun and Julie Zhu 朱常榛; Writers Shreya Gejji, Golbakhsh, Mei-Lin Te Puea Hansen, HASH, Lee, Loo, Mia Maramara and Sylvie; Cinematographer Drew Sturge; Starring Mya Williamson, Izumi Sugihara, Patricia Senocbit, Eliana Hwang, Sneha Shetty, Masoumeh Hesam Mahmoudinezhad, Dharshi Ponnampalam, Katlyn Wong; Length 87 minutes.
Seen at ACMI, Melbourne, Monday 27 February 2022.

Sweet As (2022)

Another film festival I attended in February, my first month in Melbourne, was one with a thematic focus a little closer to home than the Europa! Europa Film Festival, namely the Melbourne Women in Film Festival. It was, I gather, the seventh edition, and it’s not a big festival — there were only a handful of films, along with the screening of an old Clara Law film (itself hived off from a larger celebration of Law’s work that’s been screening over the last few weeks), and a couple of programmes of shorts as well as workshops and discussions. I only attended the opening and closing night films, but both came with unexpected (to me, because I hadn’t read the website closely) free drinks, and a generally celebratory atmosphere which is always welcome! Long may the festival continue.

---

Focusing on a young First Nations woman, Murra (Shantae Barnes-Cowan), who has been let down by her family — most immediately her drug-using and wildly erratic mother — Sweet As blossoms into a really wholesome film that I certainly hope connects with the right audiences. Murra finds herself pushed into going on a group trip with other troubled kids, where they are encouraged to discover their voices via old-fashioned film cameras that one of the guides, an enthusiastic Nicaraguan guy (Carlos Sanson Jr), is particularly keen on. Naturally this idea of photography as a way into taking control of one’s own story means the pressure is on the film’s cinematographer to capture something beautiful, and there’s definitely a sense of some tourist board-approved visuals here, though I suppose you don’t have to work hard in this bit of Western Australia to find something stunning to photograph. The core of the story, though, remains focused on Murra and the way she first resists and ultimately bonds with the others on the trip, as a sort of coming of age road trip. Perhaps it does all feel a little bit soft pedalled (and it fits rather neatly into a familiar generic framework), but this is ultimately a very hopeful film about restoring connections with other people and with the natural world.

CREDITS
Director Jub Clerc; Writers Clerc and Steve Rodgers; Cinematographer Katie Milwright; Starring Shantae Barnes-Cowan, Pedrea Jackson, Mikayla Levy, Carlos Sanson Jr, Ngaire Pigram; Length 87 minutes.
Seen at ACMI, Melbourne, Thursday 23 February 2022.

The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson (2021)

The full list of my favourite films of 2022 is here but I’m posting fuller reviews of my favourites. This Australian revisionist western film by an Aboriginal woman director, writer and star came out at festivals in 2021, but I caught up with it on a flight (it would fill a big screen though, and for some reason in my mind that’s where I saw it). Not a perfect movie, but it had a lot that I really liked.

---

I suppose that, strictly speaking, this isn’t a Western (because it’s not set in the American West, or even the West of Australia) but it shares a lot of characteristics with those kinds of frontier dramas, where (white) settlers are put in precarious situations due to their low socioeconomic status and lack of protections afforded by ‘opening up’ a country not previously inhabited by them. But as this film knows all too well, that kind of work doesn’t lead to great outcomes for indigenous populations, and while it’s based on a classic 19th century Australian short story, it’s also very keen (being written and directed by an Aboriginal woman director) to strike out in a new direction that can acknowledge the complicated history and stories being interwoven here. Which is all by way of making it sound pretty dull and well-meaning, when actually this has a lot of the striking widescreen compositions and tense drama that the best of the Western genre brings, plus some excellent lead performances from the director herself in the title role, plus Sam Reid as a well-educated indigenous man who come across her cabin and who she tries to help. By the end I felt invested in the story, even if not every element worked so well for me (the music had a tendency to push a little hard at times).

CREDITS
Director/Writer Leah Purcell; Cinematographer Mark Wareham; Starring Leah Purcell, Rob Collins, Sam Reid; Length 104 minutes.
Seen in flight from Auckland to Nouméa, Saturday 8 October 2022.

Whina (2022)

As usual, my film blog has become largely just the Criterion Sunday entries this year, so I’m going to try and post more reviews of other films, maybe some that actually make it to cinemas in this country. This one is a local production, and it’s good to see one of the co-directors/co-writers is a wāhine, one of the crop of fine women directors who gained greater exposure via Waru (2017). It’s based on the life of Dame Whina Cooper, who is probably not as well known even in Aotearoa as she used to be, but retains a fearsome reputation for her land rights activism and Māori leadership up to her death at the age of 98.

---

I can’t really deny that I found this affecting, so any flaws were very much ones that are inherent to any generation-spanning biopic treatment. Given the time constraints, events from Dame Whina’s life are distilled down into short scenes, often between people representing different ideas, in order to keep things moving. There’s a constant back and forth between the 1975 hīkoi (march) that she led down the length of the North Island as an 80-year-old (though she lived another 18 years after that) and events from earlier in her life, and it’s very much that younger self, played by Miriama McDowell, who makes the most impact in the narrative. I was left wanting more to flesh out her life but that would probably have needed a wider canvas (like a miniseries). What’s here though is strong, and is focused around the community in its own spaces (we see nothing of the government and the only real pākehā representative is the Catholic priest), and that’s probably the film’s greatest strength, in depicting the power of community organising and action. It’s a suitable stage for Whina too, and the best place to gauge her contribution to society (there’s one brief scene of her in a Wellington boardroom and it doesn’t go too well). The only regret I was left with is that, if this had been a very different film with a different attitude to history, she would have flicked one of her late husband’s cigarettes over her shoulder as she turned to leave the Bishop’s Auckland church, as, in slow-motion and under a thudding rock soundtrack, she burnt down his church like he did her meeting house. The line the filmmakers went with is almost as damning, but…

CREDITS
Directors James Napier Robertson and Paula Whetu Jones; Writers James Lucas, Napier Robertson and Jones; Cinematographer Leon Narbey; Starring Miriama McDowell, Rena Owen, Vinnie Bennett, James Rolleston; Length 112 minutes.
Seen at Penthouse, Wellington, Saturday 9 July 2021.

Global Cinema 31: Canada – Kuessipan (2019)

Having restarted this ‘Global Cinema’ thread, we’re straight into one of the largest countries in the world (by area at least), and also one of the most notable internationally in terms of film production. Some of that comes from shared resources with the USA to its south, but I think Canadian films have a very specific feeling to them, something a little bit dark and oddball. In recent years there have been more films dealing directly with issues related to First Nations and indigenous peoples, which makes for a positive change to their filmic landscape.

---

Canada
population 38,436,000 | capital Ottawa (1.3m) | largest cities Toronto (5.9m), Montréal (4.1m), Vancouver (2.5m), Calgary (1.4m), Ottawa | area 9,984,670 km² | religion Christianity (67%), none (24%), Islam (3%) | official language English, French (français) | major ethnicity European (73%), Asian (18%), indigenous (5%) | currency Canadian dollar ($) [CAD] | internet .ca

Canada is the second-largest country in the world by total area, stretching from Atlantic to Pacific in North America. It has the longest bi-national land border (with the USA), stretching almost 9000 miles. Its name is now generally accepted to come from the St. Lawrence Iruquoian word kanata, meaning “settlement”, used by the native population when directing French explorer Jacques Cartier to a nearby village, and then used by him to refer to the whole area. Human habitation from Siberia began around 14,000 years ago, and the indigenous peoples remaining in Canada are First Nations, Inuit and Métis (mixed descent people considered separately from the First Nations). European colonisation wiped out indigenous populations, which declined by up to 80% (largely due to disease, but also conflict). Nevertheless the earliest contact was likely peaceful and began with the Norse, and then in 1497 the Italian seafarer John Cabot. However a number of wars were fought between indigenous and French populations in the 17th century into the 18th, eventually leaving Britain as rulers after the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763. Quebec was granted a degree of autonomy and the use of the French language and the Catholic faith, in order to stave off the independence movement. The initial four provinces (of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick) were extended west by a series of acquisitions, and the building of railroads opened up the expanse of the country, but also the clearing of First Nations peoples into reserves. Independence came in 1931, though the country remained closely linked to the UK. National identity grew after World War II, with the Maple Leaf flag adopted in 1965 and official bilingualism in 1969. There are two houses of Parliament, the lower one (the House of Commons) and the upper (the Senate, modelled on the UK’s House of Lords).

Filmmaking in Canada stretches back to the start of cinema itself, indeed to films shot by the Lumière brothers themselves in 1896 at Niagara Falls. Nevertheless, despite this a lot of film production before WW2 was largely documentaries and propaganda, and it wasn’t until the 1960s that federal efforts to foster a feature film industry began in earnest. There were a few notable filmmakers dating back to this period (including experimental auteur Michael Snow), but it wasn’t until the 70s that Canadian cinema came to more prominence, some of which was due to notable horror films such as from Bob Clark and David Cronenberg. There’s a darker sensibility, too, to works by Claude Jutra and Denys Arcand, amongst others, that only extended in future decades. A new wave of sorts emerged in the 1980s with filmmakers like Patricia Rozema and Atom Egoyan, the latter of whom had the first Grand Prix at Cannes in 1997 with The Sweet Hereafter. A large number of US productions have also continued to use Canadian locations for their filming, blurring some of the distinctions between the two markets (and Toronto’s film festival is a major platform for a lot of Hollywood content), but it’s fair to say that in recent years there has been no shortage of Canadian film talent making waves internationally.

---

Kuessipan (2019)

One of the best things about watching films from around the world is being immersed in stories about people and cultures you’re not familiar with. This is a Canadian film, but this tells a Québec story, and specifically one set amongst First Nations people, the Innu, in the north-east of the province. The story is rather a timeless one, so in that sense there’s nothing new: two young women, one of whom finds herself pregnant too young and somewhat stuck in this little reservation outside Sept-Iles, and the other who has dreams of making it out, going to study in the big city (Québec City), maybe even getting a boyfriend who’s not Innu. These kinds of dreams all play out, with some familiar stakes, but it’s a story told from within the community, by actors and a writer who come from there and know the area well (although the director is not Innu). The emotional moments therefore land particularly strongly, and what initially is confusing and new (to me, as a viewer) starts to feel like a heartfelt portrait of a community.

CREDITS
Director Myriam Verreault; Writers Verreault and Naomi Fontaine (based on Fontaine’s novel); Cinematographer Nicolas Canniccioni; Starring Sharon Ishpatao Fontaine, Yamie Grégoire, Étienne Galloy; Length 117 minutes.
Seen at home (Mubi streaming), Wellington, Monday 15 March 2021.

NZIFF 2021: Night Raiders (2021)

Just over a year ago, I posted reviews from the 2020 London Film Festival, of which I attended a few online sessions (and which has since returned fully to cinemas this year). However, since 2020 I’ve moved to New Zealand and in November it was the New Zealand International Film Festival, now bilingually rebranded as Whānau Mārama (which loosely translates as “family of light”). Although a COVID-19 outbreak meant that there were restrictions in place (every other seat left empty and very few filmmakers present), it was still great to see these films in person, even if some of the sold out houses seemed eerily quiet.

Anyway, as it’s now December and I’ve only been posting my Criterion Collection films for the last few months, I’ll take some time over the next few weeks to post reviews of the NZIFF films I saw, which will also help us get up to speed before we get to the inevitable ‘best of the year’ lists. I’m going to start with a New Zealand co-production which focuses on issues of indigenous rights and history embedded in a story that by its nature (science-fiction) looks to the future.

---

This is pitched as a dystopian post-war science-fiction set in a fascist state where kids are taken from poor non-citizens and brainwashed to prepare them for… well, the usual. You know the deal, big Starship Troopers crossed with The Handmaid’s Tale vibes. Many of these tropes are pretty familiar, but this film puts an extra spin on them by using a First Nations perspective, wrapping up race and class with its dystopian oppression and imagining an indigenous resistance movement. In fact it puts plenty of spins on its subject matter and is all the richer for all the ideas it pops out. Some plotlines feel as if they could be more developed but then it wouldn’t be such a fine, tightly structured picture. Plus it’s lovely to see the star and director of The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers) back on screen again as a fiercely-protective mother who has a heartbreaking choice to make near the film’s outset that resonates strongly enough that it pulls the whole film together even more effectively.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Danis Goulet; Cinematographer Daniel Grant; Starring Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, Brooklyn Letexier-Hart, Alex Tarrant, Violet Nelson, Amanda Plummer; Length 101 minutes.
Seen at Light House Cuba, Wellington, Friday 5 November 2021.

First Cow (2019)

I have been holding out for this particular film since I first heard about it after it screened at the 2019 New York Film Festival. That was even before there was a pandemic, and needless to say I’m extremely glad it’s finally been screened in NZ, because it’s clearly not the most commercial of pictures. Perhaps some of the director’s previous excellent works got it that slot, or maybe it’s because there was less of a glut of Hollywood nonsense clogging up the screens, but either way I’m glad! It’s great! I saw it twice.

---

Director Kelly Reichardt’s style by now is pretty evolved, and there’s a gentleness to the pacing that belies some of the emotional stakes. Because at core this is a film about capitalism and exploitation even in the supposed freedom of the frontier, out west in early-19th century Oregon. It couldn’t be more different tonally (and in Academy-ratio colour rather than black-and-white) but I kept thinking of the similar backdrop to Dead Man and how differently the two films handle this land and the characters who are out here forging a life (the kind of loud-mouthed military man played by Ewen Bremner is far more cut from that generic cloth than the two leads, the kinds of people you just don’t usually see in Westerns, being quiet and humble and self-effacing). However, having the comparison in mind already meant it didn’t feel like much of a surprise when Gary Farmer showed up in a small role towards the end. At a narrative level, though, what surprised me is that this is essentially the story of the first hipster food stall in Oregon (of course I jest, it’s so much more than that) but also that suggests an underlying comedy that might easily be missed by focusing on the harsh frontier lives or the pathos of this single cow out there on a rich man’s land.

CREDITS
Director Kelly Reichardt; Writers Jonathan Raymond and Reichardt (based on Raymond’s novel The Half Life); Cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt; Starring John Magaro, Orion Lee, Toby Jones, Ewen Bremner, Scott Shepherd, Gary Farmer; Length 121 minutes.
Seen at Light House Cuba, Wellington, Friday 30 April 2021 and Wednesday 5 May 2021.

Cousins (2021)

Finishing the week of New Zealand-themed films with one that’s just been released in cinemas here, a multi-generational story written and directed by two women filmmakers, which grapples with some of NZ’s colonialist history and how it has affected several indigenous Maori women.

---

These kinds of generational stories of trauma, especially ones anchored in memory, feel like the kind of thing that New Zealand filmmakers have been adept at making for some time now. This example is a fine one, with each of the three title characters played by three different actors at various ages (childhood, young adulthood and then, around half a century later I would guess, as old people). The film obliquely blends stories from these three different eras, tying them together with flashbacks but also with visual cues and colours in the set and costume design, which have a poetic feeling to them, and makes up for some of the more sentimental stretches in the narrative. That said, I felt wrapped up in the emotion of the journey, which neatly ties together these strands, evoking a sense of ancestry, of the presence of death and the continuation of life that is presumably drawn from mythology as well as a shared understanding of the meaning of the land and of nature. There’s also, rather more directly, a reckoning with the racist policies of previous generations, especially with regards to orphaned children, keeping them from families deemed insufficiently civilised and placed in foster care (and the foster mother here is a bit of a monster). There’s a lot in the characters here, and in the grand sweep of the melodrama, and for the most part it held my attention well.

CREDITS
Directors Ainsley Gardiner and Briar Grace Smith; Writer Smith (based on the novel by Patricia Grace); Cinematographer Raymond Edwards; Starring Tanea Heke, Rachel House, Briar Grace Smith; Length 98 minutes.
Seen at Light House Cuba, Wellington, Friday 5 March 2021.

Dawn Raid (2021)

I’ve already done a week themed around NZ films, but look, I’m here in this country now, and I’m doing another, because I have, after all, seen more of them since arriving. There’s a new one out this week called Cousins, so I’m aiming to finish the week with a review of that, but in the meantime, this documentary I’m reviewing below is the first 2021 film I saw in cinemas, and it brings me up to a speed a bit with the years I missed while in, um, exile? It’s also worth thinking about because it’s at least partially a portrait of an underprivileged area of Auckland, Papatoetoe specifically, which has been much in the NZ news recently for being where some Covid-related lockdowns have originated, largely because its residents hold the lower-paid jobs for large international industries located nearby, including the airport.

---

Having recently relocated to NZ after a couple of decades away, it’s fair to say I was familiar with precisely none of the people in this film (aside from the American rappers who show up or are referenced periodically). I don’t know the South Auckland-based music label this documentary is about, I don’t know the key figures in that company, and I don’t even know any of the musical acts, but the very least I take from it is that there was and is plenty of talent in this impoverished part of NZ’s largest city. It’s a story of two grifters, young lads from difficult backgrounds who’d dropped out of high school and we’re trying to get their lives back on track in their early-20s via business college, who soaked up the lessons quickly and decided to start an empire on the streets of Papatoetoe (literally, not just making music, but owning food outlets, a barbers shop, office space, and who made much of their money via T-shirt sales). Although things go the route you sort of expect them to, along the way Dawn Raid Entertainment seem to have done a lot of good for their community, even if it is initially odd seeing this ginger-haired white guy explaining how his line of t-shirts reclaims derogatory terms used for Pacific Islands people (and perhaps, hidden in there somewhere, you can see a slight haze of hagiography even if not all the label’s artists in their interviews are quite as positive about its founders as the film tries to be). Ultimately it’s a documentary about community, and though I went in not knowing anything about the scene it covers, I ended up feeling rather fondly towards the two.

CREDITS
Director Oscar Kightley; Writers Matthew Metcalfe and Tim Woodhouse; Cinematographer Fred Renata; Length 98 minutes.
Seen at the Light House Cuba, Wellington, Thursday 28 January 2021.

Finding ‘Ohana (2021)

I feel as if my themed week of Netflix has just made the case that they are good at formulaic, brightly-coloured confections, and if so today’s review won’t change that opinion. Maybe it’s true. There is some good, nuanced, interesting stuff on there too (they’ve added a bunch of Youssef Chahine films, and now some Swedish silents I gather), so who knows maybe one day it’ll be a great service for everyone. In the mean time, there’s Mubi if you like austere arthouse and Amazon if you like to support the exploitation of workers (also they have some good content of their own), so really it’s a great time for online streaming.

---

Unlike the Netflix film I reviewed yesterday, the Chinese movie Monster Run, which felt a bit like a kids’ film, this very much is a kids’ film. There’s little point in me complaining some of the child acting is a bit lacking in nuance (that would be absurd) or that the plotting can be silly. After all, when we get the flashbacks to the ye olde times white explorers, it’s narrated in a Drunk History style, and they’re played by Chris Parnell and Marc Evan Jackson, so clearly silliness is the point. The set design feels like a Disney theme park version of Hawai’i and the film ends up basically being an advert for the place, but that’s certainly forgivable too. These are all intentional choices and they make sense for this film. It’s a likeable, brightly-coloured reimagining of The Goonies in Hawai’i and while it’s unlikely to have that film’s enduring (cult?) appeal, it does everything it’s supposed to do and has its heart in a good place.

CREDITS
Director Jude Weng 翁菲菲; Writer Christina Strain; Cinematographer Cort Fey; Starring Kea Peahu, Alex Aiono, Lindsay Watson; Length 123 minutes.
Seen at home (Netflix streaming), Wellington, Thursday 18 February 2021.