Girls weren’t allowed to play rugby when Lisa Burd was a kid. Her new documentary, filmed in the Taranaki heartland, shows how much that’s changed.
No Tears on the Field comes with a content warning.
It’s not for violence, although the bone-crushing physicality isn’t for the faint-hearted. It’s not for sex, either, although there’s plenty of unbridled passion on display.
“Contains swearing consistent with provincial rugby,” reads a cautionary note on the Doc Edge 2025 festival programme for New Plymouth filmmaker Lisa Burd’s latest documentary, which has its world premiere in Auckland on June 25.
And if you’re thinking, “typical bloody blokes”, think again. Shot through a brutal Taranaki winter during the 2024 premier club season, the film is a joyous and often hilarious love letter to women’s grassroots rugby.
And it’s women – from a pre-teen girls’ team who’ve just “smashed” the boys to a Black Ferns superstar – who get the final word.
“The [festival organisers] called me and said, ‘What are we going to do about the swearing?’” says Burd. “But they decided not to bleep it out because there’d be almost nothing left; the beeps would be constant. And that’s what a true blue doco is.”
People talk about the arts being a labour of love, but for an independent filmmaker like Burd, it truly is. No Tears on the Field, her fifth documentary, is almost completely self-funded.
She sold her campervan to help finance the project and gave up her paid job as a visual journalist at the Taranaki Daily News late last year to concentrate on getting it completed. A Boosted campaign aiming to raise $30,000 to help cover the final costs closes next week.
The day before we talk, Burd has been up till midnight working on the colour grading, after driving up to Auckland from New Plymouth in atrocious weather.
She did much of the initial filming herself and, to the exasperation of her post-production team, used half a dozen different forms of camera during the shoot, including a GoPro, a drone and her cellphone.
“Matching all those colours is quite challenging,” she says. “But I just picked up [what was at hand] and started.”
Burd is exhausted, but the result speaks for itself. Finalists for the Doc Edge Awards have just been announced and No Tears on the Field has been nominated in five categories: best feature, director, editing, sound, and cinematography.
Choosing not to use an intrusive voiceover makes for raw and immersive storytelling, a deceptively difficult approach that’s become Burd’s trademark style.
For The Pinkies are Back, her 2021 documentary, she embedded with a dragon boat team made up of breast cancer survivors. Monterey, released in 2016, was filmed at an Auckland cafe over an entire year and won her a Doc Edge emerging filmmaker award.
Here, the star power is provided by double Olympic gold medallist Michaela Blyde, who started out playing club rugby in Taranaki before gaining legendary status with the Black Ferns Sevens.
Now Michaela Brake, after marrying rower Michael Brake, she’s just signed for the Warriors’ women’s team for its return to the league competition this year.
Getting her on camera, alongside her mother, Cherry – herself a former Black Fern – was a real coup. The guts of the story, though, is grounded firmly in the heartland. “The real legends come out of grassroots rugby,” says Burd.
A local girl who grew up on a dry-stock farm in Taranaki chasing her two older brothers around, Burd admits there wasn’t universal support for her decision to focus solely on the women’s game when she first pitched the idea.
Currently based in New Plymouth, she also had to break down an instinctive reserve where she was kept at arm’s length, even within the clubs whose fortunes she followed most closely. “It took a long time to build people’s trust. They still see me as a townie, I think.”
An immensely engaging and entertaining story, packed with unexpected twists and turns, No Tears on the Field centres on key players from two rival teams hunting the championship title.
Kate Thomson, who’s nicknamed The Bulldozer, manages a large dairy farm and is a powerful prop with the Southern Sharks, the defending champions after beating Clifton in a nail-biter final by just three points.
“Absolutely no mercy on the field,” she says, with a grin. “I don’t care who you are, if you’re in front of me, I’m going to run you over.”
Maddison Davison, another big personality totally at ease in front of the camera, plays at Number 8 for Clifton and works on her parents’ sharemilking farm. Her dad, Justin, coaches Clifton and her mum, Brenda, is the team manager.
Mereana Anderson is a prop for Clifton. A “beautiful, bubbly” primary school teacher, she’s utterly ruthless on the field and has ambitions to play for the Black Ferns.
Women’s rugby is often more exciting to watch, she reckons. “No offence to the All Blacks, but it is.” When she’s on the rampage, it takes about seven people to bring her down.
Another rising talent is her teammate Phoenix Fraser, a flanker who was just 16 when Burd began filming.
The documentary also features former Black Ferns coach Vicky Dombroski, the only woman to have held that role.
Grace, strength, power – you need all of that to play rugby, says Burd, who was forced to draw on some inner toughness of her own, filming from the sideline in freezing conditions.
“I’d have 50 layers on and they’d just be in their little shorts with steam coming off their backs.
“They look great and they’re just so bulletproof, you know? They all love it, the camaraderie. There’s such strength and resilience in all of them.
“Kate has had so many bad injuries and can rattle them off, but she’s desperate to get 100 games under her belt and just keeps coming back. I think she’d be lost without it.
“They find their power within. On the rugby field, you get to be the true side of yourself in a way that [as women] you might not otherwise get the chance to do. And then some of them go out afterwards with their makeup on and dressed up to the nines.”
Not all of the women have had an easy time of it, facing some significant personal losses along the way. That’s handled with sensitivity by Burd, who’s always been drawn to the underdog.
A sub-plot threaded through the main narrative tells the comeback story of Tukapa, a club that was fielding a team for the first time in 30 years.
“Their mission was to do it quietly, slowly and make it all about the women,” she says. “So they set up a creche and arranged cooking nights, where the boys would cook one night and the girls the other. They just totally embraced that.
“In their first game, they got wasted. But we round back to them at the very end and it shows the results of how well they were looked after and how the guys loved having the girls there.”
Other clubs are starting to take notice. While the number of men playing rugby in New Zealand is declining, registrations by women and girls are at record levels.
That’s forcing a change in attitudes, says Burd, with both skill levels and public support for the women’s game reaching new highs.
“I think people are realising they have to go with the times if they want to be in to win, and that if they have a good women’s team, then that’ll be good for their club.”
Doc Edge is putting on a special screening of No Tears on The Field at an independent cinema in Stratford for those who can’t leave their farms and make it to the Auckland premiere.
Burd brought a largely local crew on board – Mt Taranaki becomes a character in its own right in the film – and local blues band The Mons Whaler gifted some of their music for the soundtrack.
In 2016, Burd worked on Real Housewives of Auckland in casting and as a field producer, later making a documentary, Let’s Talk About Sex, with Julia Sloane, one of the reality show’s controversial stars.
The two worlds couldn’t seem further apart, but Burd sees some similarities in their alpha personalities.
“They’re all strong women within themselves and there’s a confidence in that they don’t mind being seen,” she says. “They’ve got a goal, they’ve named it and they’ve gone for it.”
In 2022, a record-breaking 1.3 million Kiwis watched the Black Ferns lift the Women’s Rugby World Cup. In August, they head to England to defend their title.
A seven-day dating boot camp in China, family separations on the US/Mexico border and the dark underbelly of the global tuna trade are among the eclectic lineup at this year’s festival.
More than 30 world premieres mark Doc Edge’s 20th anniversary, which will showcase 90 features, short films and immersive projects.
Opening on June 25, the programme screens across two months in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, with virtual cinema passes also available for online viewing.
An Oscar-qualifying festival, Doc Edge presents its annual awards on July 3, and winners of the best local and international feature and short film categories will be eligible for consideration at the 2026 Academy Awards.
Here’s a taster of what’s in store:
Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror
It’s 50 years since The Time Warp unleashed a global cult following. And who better to explore that phenomenon than director Linus O’Brien – Rocky Horror creator Richard O’Brien, who also played Riff Raff, is his dad.
Folktales
Three Gen Z teens enrol in a traditional “folk high school” in the Arctic wilds of northern Norway, spending a year off social media with only a team of sled dogs for company. Let’s hope they do a better job of surviving than the Yellowjackets did.
A Sisters’ Tale
In Iran, women are forbidden from singing in public. For seven years, director Leila Amini filmed her sister, Nasreen – once silenced by marriage and tradition – as she dared to reclaim her voice.
Ms President
A lawyer and human rights activist, Zuzana Caputova faced “an aggressively misogynistic atmosphere” in 2019 when she became Slovakia’s first female president (sound familiar?). An intimate portrait of her five years in power.
Never Get Busted
How a former Texas narcotics officer switched sides to become a frontline fighter against America’s War on Drugs.
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior lifestyle writer with a special interest in social issues and the arts.
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