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Whina Reviews

Whina is given very well-appointed and loving treatment in a story that’s so powerful it rises above the filmmakers’ more sentimental tendencies.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 1, 2023

A respectful tribute to a remarkable activist with strong central performances, but less restraint and more spirit would have gone a long way

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 20, 2022

… brings a critical figure in Aotearoan history to vivid, if somewhat sentimentalised, life.

Full Review | Original Score: 15/20 | Oct 29, 2022

It is as much a lesson from history as it is a profoundly intimate portrait of an individual, but rides both of these waves with grace and beauty to spare.

Full Review | Original Score: 4 / 5 | Aug 21, 2022

The film opts for a sweeping overview, which gives the narrative scope but suffers by not always capturing the inner world of a woman who experienced myriad heartbreaks without losing a sense of herself.

Full Review | Aug 16, 2022

Miriama McDowell and Vinnie Bennett as Dame Whina and William Cooper bring their love story to life, and Rena Owen brings the gravitas and mana wahine as she marched her way down the motu and into the history books.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 30, 2022

One of Aotearoa's most iconic leaders gets an appropriately uplifting biopic in this respectful portrait anchored by heavyweight performances from Miriama McDowell and Rena Owen.

Full Review | Jun 23, 2022

Directors James Napier Robertson and Paula Whetu Jones coax great performances from all their cast, but the absolute stars here will always be Miriama McDowell and Rena Owen, playing Whina as a grown and elderly woman respectively

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jun 22, 2022

Whina is a triumph. A soaring, heartful telling of the life of Dame Whina Cooper, Te Whāea-o-te-Motu, a leader and activist who fought ceaselessly for Māori and their whenua.

Full Review | Jun 21, 2022

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A soaring and heartful telling of Dame Whina Cooper’s life, Whina is a triumph

Aotearoa biopic Whina charts the life of iconic Māori leader and activist Dame Whina Cooper, brought to life on screen by Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne, Miriama McDowell and Rena Owen. While the film is a powerful portrait of the woman at its heart, it is also a breathtaking picture of nearly a century of social history, writes Rachel Ashby.

When the screening of Whina I went to came to an end, there was a total silence in the packed movie theatre. It’s a magic thing to be in a crowd awed by storytelling, to know you have all just collectively watched something very special.

Directed by James Napier Robertson ( The Dark Horse ) and Paula Whetu Jones ( Waru ), Whina is a triumph. A soaring, heartful telling of the life of Dame Whina Cooper, Te Whāea-o-te-Motu, a leader and activist who fought ceaselessly for Māori and their whenua. It’s a monumental story to bring to the screen and one that has rightly taken many hands, and many years to achieve.

Three wāhine toa take on the hearty job of portraying Whina across her life, each rising masterfully to the task. Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne is a ferocious teenage Whina, while Miriama McDowell carries the role of Whina as a young woman through to middle age with grounded resoluteness. The singularly challenging job of portraying the 80-year-old Whina, the well-documented and iconic leader of Te Rōpū Matakite o Aotearoa and the 1975 Land March to Parliament, is expertly handled by the legendary Rena Owen.

It is a huge role to take on, and all three actors have spoken about the particular ways in which channeling Whina has affected them not only as storytellers but as wāhine Māori. Certainly, there is a gravitas to each actor’s portrayal of Whina that honours her enormous legacy without reducing her personhood. McDowell, who spends the most time inhabiting Whina on-screen, has some of the hardest personal moments in Cooper’s biography to grapple with: the death of two young husbands, displacement from her turangawaewae and an ongoing internal struggle with accepting her rangatiratanga. She brings an empathy and determination to her performance that anchors the story in Whina’s humanity.

While the film is a powerful portrait of the woman at its heart, it is also a breathtaking picture of nearly a century of social history. Time expands and contracts throughout the film, and the telling of its events is non-linear. By threading the tapestry of Whina’s narrative back and forward, it brings to the forefront the scope of change that occurred across her lifetime for te Iwi Māori.

As viewers we are left with the understanding that this story is as contemporary to us now as it is to those on the screen. Archival footage is used well towards the end of the film to underline this idea and break the fourth wall in a purposeful way. The sight of thousands of people walking over the Auckland Harbour bridge—a news clip from 1975 that I have seen many times before—brought me to tears. It is a reminder, if one was needed, that all of this is very real, very recent and still very urgent.

There is a hopefulness at the film’s core that echoes Whina’s own activism: a promise to keep pushing despite opposition, and a reminder to think of the generation that follows. In this way, the film feels like a wero. There is much work to be done, so how are we going to do it?

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Charlotte Rampling’s enchanting charisma assists the familiar-feeling Juniper

Despite a great cast, Juniper can’t escape the clichés of similar films.

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Proud Voices launches to celebrate queer content creators in Aotearoa

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Cousins is a deeply moving dramatic triumph

Engrossing Māori drama impacts deeply on an emotional level.

Vital NZ film communicates trans experiences like no other

For a trans audience, seeing Rūrangi will feel like coming home for the first time.

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NZ Herald – Movie review: Gloriavale

By Tom Augustine – NZ Herald – 19/08/2022

There are certainly shades of the addictive true crime documentary formula that has swept the world in the buzzed-about New Zealand/Australia co-production Gloriavale. From its handsome, wintry cinematography to its eerie use of archival footage of the religious sect’s early days, all smiling faces and children playing.

It’s one of our nation’s darkest persistent issues, and one asked regularly by the lawyers and ex-members profiled here – how is a country with such a positive and progressive disposition allow the continued existence of a place such as Gloriavale?

Read more here: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/movie-review-gloriavale/YMDKMI4ACF64HQBRJTOFY23CXY/

Shayne Currie: NZ Herald Editor-at-large on Stuff's new business agreement with Warner Brothers Discovery

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The Mission review – a missionary comes a cropper on reaching an ‘unreached’ tribe

Documentary traces a 21st-century American evangelical’s reckless efforts to convert an isolated tribe, and his fatal encounter with them

O ne of the most isolated Indigenous people on Earth, the Sentinelese of India’s North Sentinel Island remain a mystery to anthropologists. For evangelical Christian groups, however, these so-called “unreached” tribes represent a challenge – and a calling. Through illicit means, 26-year-old American missionary John Chau approached the island in 2018 with gifts and Bible verses. The Sentinelese responded with a hail of arrows, killing the young man. The incident made international headlines , with Chau’s death prompting a flurry of reactions ranging from claims of martyrdom to mocking memes. Diving into the heart of the puzzle, Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’s documentary strives to contextualise – and empathise – with Chau’s gruesome end.

Read out by actors, excerpts from Chau’s diary and a letter from Chau’s father illuminate the circumstances that spurred his quest. Wholly immersed in a Christian and evangelical education, Chau was also transfixed by colonial adventure stories. His near decade-long preparation for the fatal journey includes him learning survival skills and getting training in emergency medicine. He even joined a missionary bootcamp where facilitators would act the roles of hostile tribespeople.

Interviews with failed missionaries and expert anthropologists, however, reveal the futility, the recklessness, and the arrogance of Chau’s endeavour. Produced under the banner of the documentary arm of National Geographic, The Mission even uses the channel own’s archival works to allude to media complicity in perpetuating exotic imagery of indigenous lives. Yet the film also suffers from similar missteps. Though effective in filling in the gaps of Chau’s story, the impressionistic animation dramatising his final moments commits a similar sin as the swashbuckling tales of yore, and makes a spectacle out of a tragedy that is ultimately not all that mysterious or abstract – but in fact grounded in material sociopolitical contexts.

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NZ Herald on 2022-02-18 03:49

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The Lost Boys of Dilworth shines light on decades of abuse at all-boys school - The Front Page

Chelsea Daniels

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The Lost Boys of Dilworth retells part of the story of what happened at an Auckland boarding school. Photo / TVNZ

“Brutal, isolated, authoritarian, loveless place where students lived in continual fear of older students, tutors, housemasters, teachers, and the whole school system”.

This is from a report after an independent inquiry into private Auckland boarding school, Dilworth.

It’s where more than 100 boys were abused by staff, tutors, housemasters, and other students for nearly 70 years.

Many of the boys were just eight or nine when the abuse began. Many ended up developing addictions to drugs, alcohol, and pornography. Some went on to commit crime, while others suffered from severe mental ill health. A new docudrama, The Lost Boys of Dilworth , aired on TVNZ 1 last night and retold part of the story of what happened at the school.

“Most of the men the inquiry met with who were abused are in various stages of rebuilding from shattered and broken periods in their adult lives,” said the inquiry’s co-leaders, Dame Silvia Cartwright and Frances Joychild, KC.

Open Justice editor Elizabeth Binning told The Front Page the abuse goes back decades.

“Police originally said there was abuse from the 1970s to the early 2000s. But I was quickly getting calls from men who said they were abused there in the 1960s. I was also contacted by a widow who believed that her late husband had been abused even earlier than that, in the 1950s,” she said.

An inquiry found abuse kept coming to the attention of the board, but it wasn’t reported to police.

“It was a really extensive inquiry. The findings were something like 500 pages long. It just found that the board didn’t investigate the complaints properly. It didn’t report most of the abuse to the police and it also left the abusers to just quietly leave the school, often with their careers intact,” Binning said.

“Some of them went on and had other jobs. In some cases they left with glowing references with no hint at all that there was anything suspicious in the person leaving.”

Docudrama highlights Dilworth’s darkness

The Lost Boys of Dilworth delves into the lived experiences of some former pupils. Mark Staufer, the writer and main voice of the programme, was a victim himself.

Co-directors Mary Durham and Peter Burger told The Front Page the culture of secrecy contributed to the perpetuation of darkness.

“You can kind of see how something would start with that sort of ‘don’t tell, we’ll beat you up’ sort of thing and scale all the way up to this systemic sexual assault,” Burger said.

“Lost Boys, to me, implies that a lot of their life has been hideously affected by what happened to them. And unfortunately, some of them haven’t achieved perhaps what they might’ve achieved if these horrors hadn’t been inflicted on them,” Durham said.

The re-enactments that are shot from a child’s perspective were a conscious decision.

“I think hearing from the men as they edge towards and tip over the 60-year-old mark, you know, what they say is extraordinarily powerful,” Durham said.

“But, when you see these men represented by these young actors, as children, that’s what really hammers it home. You see how innocent and how lovely these children were and the obvious effects that have been wrought on them all these years later.”

The Lost Boys of Dilworth is available to watch on TVNZ+.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about the trials that uncovered the darkness at Dilworth and how the docudrama came to be.

The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.

You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio , Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or wherever you get your podcasts.

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