Herald rating: * * * * *
Cast: Sonny Kirikiri, Calvin Tuteao, John Callen, Michael Lawrence, Star Gossage.
Director: Barry Barclay
Running time: 82 minutes
Rating: M
Now showing: Village Queen St
Review: Peter Calder
Among the shooting stars who stud our film industry, Barry Barclay burns with a clear steady light.
For nearly 30 years, he has quietly fashioned memorable films for cinema and television about the way Maori and pakeha brush up against each other.
Some, such as Ngati, have been lyrical and approachable; others, like Te Rua, have trembled with barely suppressed indignation and an almost preternatural energy and have been less widely accessible for that. Others, such as the Tangata Whenua series, are landmarks.
This feature-length documentary which confronts, 165 years after the event, the ruthlessly efficient extermination of the Chatham Islands' first inhabitants, the Moriori, by invading Taranaki Maori, played to a packed house in the recent festival.
A mainstream release is a rare distinction for a documentary but the film sits comfortably in the company of War Stories or Patu!
He adapts the quasi-newsreel form pioneered by Peter Watkins' excellent Culloden, made for British TV in the 60s, "interviewing" actors whose words are drawn from the contemporary record.
But while that film pitched us into the middle of a single battle, this takes us slowly and inexorably into the heart of one of our nation's most shameful forgotten stories.
Interrogating the past to illuminate the present, the film takes us from the first European landfall in 1791, through the 1835 Maori invasions to the 1870 Land Court decisions which gave more than 97 per cent of the islands to the invaders and not to the resolutely pacifist people they displaced.
Along the way, and almost incidentally, it disposes of the reactionary fiction that Maori displaced Moriori from mainland Aotearoa and therefore have no claim on this land.
It's an intensely absorbing work which brings history alive and should be seen by everyone who claims the name New Zealander.
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