Over the past five decades, films from New Zealand have entertained audiences with moving stories and entrancing visual style. A number feature stories from the vastly underrepresented Māori community, celebrating their experiences in local cinemas and introducing their culture to international audiences. Years after movies like Patu!, Once Were Warriors, Whale Rider, Boy, and What We Do In The Shadows, two more Māori directors make their feature debuts this month, taking on the legacy of colonialism by fighting for cultural awareness from two different ancestral angles.
Taratoa Stappard’s Mārama is a haunting gothic horror that transports its lead character away from her beloved home in New Zealand to the chilly shores of North Yorkshire in 1850s England. Orphaned as a baby, Mary (Ariāna Osborne) arrives to search for answers for what happened to her family. Instead, she finds Nathaniel (Toby Stephens), a retired whaler with a fetish for Mary’s culture and a half-Māori granddaughter in need of a governess. Trapped and still awaiting answers, Mary stays to search for the truth of what happened to her family, enduring Nathaniel’s increasingly uncomfortable advances and his associates’ crude appropriation of her culture. Mary is a seer, and soon visions start to piece together what her captors will not. Danger is imminent, but Mary refuses to leave without the answers she longs to know.
Mārama opens with a content warning about the harsh realities of colonialist brutality depicted in the film, and it does not soften the indignities and threats Mary endures on her journey. Nathaniel uses knowledge of her language and culture to manipulate her trust, but it becomes clear that he does not see Māori as people but as something to collect, like the whales he once hunted. Mārama shows the pernicious ways the Māori were exoticized, ridiculed, and killed by colonists. Eventually, Mary can no longer stay silent in the face of Nathaniel and his friend’s jokes about the Māori, and she rebuts their mockery with a passionate haka. The film’s high-contrast cinematography and dramatic use of color heightens her fight for survival, to make it back home with her family’s secrets, and to give her ancestors the proper burial they deserve.
Stappard channels movies like Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak to achieve his debut’s eerie, haunting tone. Nathaniel’s Victorian mansion acts like a gilded cage, and even the traditional Māori home he’s rebuilt in his backyard is part of his bizarre need to “own” the Māori culture, like an artifact stolen for the British Museum. Like a horrific Jane Eyre, Mary is physically trapped in the house with a controlling employer who’s obsessed with her, but through her visions, she can escape to the black sandy beaches of Aotearoa. But in this ghost story, it is not the supernatural elements that are frightening. At first, the visions are disturbing and disorienting, but the answers Mary’s ancestors bring her give her a clarity no one else on this island will.
If Mārama represents a Māori cinema reckoning with the horrors of the past, then Rachel House’s The Mountain can be seen as hope for the future. Sam (Elizabeth Atkinson) is a cancer patient who feels called to climb the mountain Taranaki for healing purposes. Along the way, she meets Mallory (Reuben Francis) and Bronco (Terence Daniel) who join her on her secret expedition. Confronted with the realities of her condition, she comes to depend on her newfound friends to forge ahead.
Written by House and Tom Furniss, The Mountain is both an adventurous coming-of-age story in the vein of Stand By Me (but with a lot more deadpan humor) and as an emotional story about reconnecting with one’s culture. Sam is Māori but grew up outside the culture. Her journey to the mountain is a spiritual one, informed by internet research and a curiosity to learn more about who she is beyond her illness. Her friendship with Mallory and Bronco helps her discover who she is, especially as Bronco shares his language and culture with his friends. That friendship also represents a kind of hope for the future of New Zealand, one where people of all walks of life can learn from each other and support each other. The Mountain also explains the Māori connection with mountains or maunga, considering them like living ancestors who guide and connect us with one another. Friendship can be one more form of healing.
This sense of camaraderie also extends to the film’s crew. House, a longtime standout in the New Zealand film industry with acting credits in Moana and Whale Rider, reunites here with her Hunt For Wilderpeople co-star Troy Kingi, and Wilderpeople director Taika Waititi serves as an executive producer. And both The Mountain and Mārama found support from the New Zealand Film Commission and media organizations like New Zealand On Air and Whakaata Māori, which help the next generation of Māori filmmakers like House and Stappard bring their projects to audiences at home and abroad.
House and Stappard’s feature debuts take vastly different approaches, yet both celebrate Māori culture with a reverence for the past. In Mārama, it’s focused on fighting against the centuries of abuse and erasure in order to grieve the violence perpetrated against families like Mary’s. In The Mountain, reversing that erasure is part of a healing journey, a later-in-life decision to embrace one’s full identity that is just as valid as those who grew up surrounded by the language and customs at home. Yet both share a love and respect for ancestors no matter what shape they take to help their kin. The films’ vast differences in narrative and visual storytelling just make them great additions to the already rich filmography of New Zealand, ones in conversation with the decades of great Māori films celebrating their culture onscreen.
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