Muru is ostensibly a movie about the October 2007 police anti-terrorism raids in the Tūhoe communities of Rūātoki and Tāneatua. It’s set there and in the surrounding valleys of Te Urewera, it was filmed there, and its many extras and workers were drawn from the local community. And veteran Tūhoe artist-activist Tame Iti, who was arrested during the raids, stars in the film – as himself.
But the movie opens with titles explaining that while it was inspired by the events of 15 years ago, it’s not a depiction of them. It declares: “This is a response.”
It’s a response that is a deft juggling act. It’s both a protest work and a tense action-thriller – one that harks back to early New Zealand films such as Sleeping Dogs and Bad Blood. Even its name, Muru – a Māori concept of forgiveness or restorative justice – has echoes of Utu, the 1983 Geoff Murphy film about avenging warrior Te Wheke, set during the New Zealand Wars.
But it’s also a character-based drama anchored on a local cop, played by Cliff Curtis, whose duties also include driving the school bus and caring for his aged father. He gets caught between his community and the anti-terror squad who are taking their orders from the Beehive.
Muru also hinges on the character of troubled teenager Rusty/ Waikura (Poroaki Merritt-McDonald), who has recently returned to the community after getting caught up in the justice system. When the squad swoops in and starts pulling people from their beds and holding guns to their heads, the angry young man is caught in the crossfire.
It’s the fourth feature by director Tearepa Kahi. His earlier films have been much gentler affairs, whether it was the young band drama of Mt Zion or his celebratory music documentaries Herbs: Songs of Freedom and Poi E: The Story of Our Song. But it was a conversation with Iti – a few years after Iti served nine months in jail for firearms offences emerging from the raid, and who Kahi and his producer wife, Reikura, had long known through their respective fathers – that he started to ponder a movie.
“That’s when a little light bulb went off in terms of not setting the record straight, but how can we tell a story that gives [Iti’s] truth and actually speaks to what really happened in terms of the personal impact.”
While the raids, for which the police apologised to Tūhoe in 2014, is the foundation, Muru’s script was also influenced by other events that predate 2007.
The figure of Rusty/Waikura was inspired by Steven Wallace, the 23-year-old shot dead by police in 2000 after he went on a window-smashing spree in the centre of Waitara, Taranaki. The Wallace story had also influenced Kahi’s 2005 debut short, The Speaker, about a tagger caught by police but whose brother takes the blame. Kahi was the same age as Wallace when the short was made.
“What happened to him was part of my personal and artistic response through that short film,” Kahi tells the Listener. “And so he’s been a part of my fabric for a long time, because I’ve been a frustrated 23-year-old … I just thought if I can create a character that could show an alternative pathway to what happened to him.”
That was part of his early discussions with Curtis, whose working relationship dates back to when the actor executive-produced Kahi’s second short film, Tauā: War Party, an ambitious precolonial tale about warriors hauling a massive waka through the bush of the Waitākere Ranges. Curtis was also a producer on the Herbs film and both were producers on the 2018 doco about pioneering Māori film-maker Merata Mita, Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen.
The other major influence on Muru was the idea that the 2007 raid shouldn’t be seen in isolation – that it was another chapter in Tūhoe’s long history of conflict with the Crown, including the 1916 arrest of religious and tribal leader Rua Kēnana in a police raid of his community at Maungapōhatu, in which one of his sons and a cousin were shot dead.
That the film might encompass the iwi’s longer view came from early meetings Kahi had in Rūātoki as he sounded out locals’ feelings.
“One of the ladies there said, ‘So, it’s just about the events of one day.’ And I said ‘Yes, absolutely, we’re going to nail this’, because at the time, the script was quite faithful in its depiction.
“But I’ll never forget her face when she said, ‘Because if this is about the events of one day, I don’t support it because the government had been doing this to us systematically … This has happened over and over again. So if you’re only telling one day, I don’t support it. If you’re telling the full story, that’s what we want.’”
Kahi was persuaded. He talked to Curtis about possibly moving the story away from a blow-by-blow depiction of the events of 2007 into something allegorical. “Still tell the truth, but not based on plot points.”
He redrafted his script – not for the last time. Kahi was happy that the story he now wanted to tell was emerging.
“The story I wanted to tell was one that draws on real events but doesn’t keep us mired or stuck in the era. I had written the faithful version, and it made the government look like idiots – it almost looked like an assassination piece. But I thought we were missing a real opportunity if we tell that story as it happened. This is something that can hopefully show the real impacts and get beyond that.
“Muru is an opportunity to speak truth to power through cinema, because the ache is still real.”
While Curtis had been cast in the film from the beginning, the casting of Iti took its own good time as Kahi reworked the script. Hearing of Curtis’ involvement, Iti briefly thought the actor was going to be playing him. Eventually, Kahi told Iti he was the only man for the job.
Kahi says Poi E was an influence – he restructured the documentary around archive interviews with the song’s co-writer Dalvanius Prime to make him its storyteller. “Only Dalvanius could play Dalvanius, and it was the same thing with this. Why ask an actor to portray Tame? That would just be a betrayal to everyone. So Tame has to play Tame.”
Shot in the summer of 2019-20, Muru also stars Jay Ryan and Manu Bennett as rival members of the anti-terror squad, Simone Kessell as part of a surveillance team and musician-actor Troy Kingi as Rusty’s stepfather.
The film represents the third film for the Kahi family director-producer team. Three of their four children are among the kids in the school bus driven by Curtis (who had to get a bus licence for the film) that gets caught up in events.
Reikura Kahi laughs that while producing a film of many moving parts – including a police helicopter, high-speed ute chases, a stunt crew, a location shoot – had its challenges, corralling the various members of Herbs together was possibly harder.
Now, the pair are working on their next film, a feature about a squad of Māori Battalion soldiers in World War II Italy encountering German armour while out hunting for hāngī supplies in a forest. “It’s funny, heart-wrenching and it’s got panzers,” Tearepa laughs.
First, though, the director is taking Muru to the Toronto International Film Festival where it’s screening in the Contemporary World Cinema section.
The film was the opening-night screening at the New Zealand International Film Festival in the main centres. Kahi is on the festival board but was still chuffed the programmers independently chose Muru as the event’s lead-off, just as Poi E had been in 2016.
“I thought it was a brave step on their behalf. It wasn’t like we were planning for it to be a festival film. It was not part of the original plan.”
He enjoyed the audience feedback, especially from some members of “the classic film festival crowd” in Dunedin. “A lovely lady came up to me at the end and said, ‘If I’d known it was going to be that violent I wouldn’t have come. But great film, I loved it.’ And another guy said, ‘I was expecting a festival film and I saw a blockbuster.’”
Muru is getting its first free-to-air screening tonight at 8.30pm on Three.
This story was first published in the September 10, 2022 issue of the Listener.
