Unexpected Collisions: Māoriland 2025

On the back wall of the Māoriland Hub, in the Toi Matarau Gallery on the main street of Ōtaki on the Kāpiti Coast of Te Ika-a-Māui (the North Island of New Zealand), hangs a map of the world. Hand painted on a large sheet of canvas, the black outlines of islands and continents lack national borders but are filled by Indigenous place names, mapping out Te Ao Taketake (“The Indigenous World”). What makes this map special is that each year at Māoriland Film Festival, filmmakers and attendees are invited to place their own Native homelands on it, these new places marked out in strips of green masking tape. The map of Te Ao Taketake metonymises the programming identity of Māoriland Film Festival as a whole. Rather than constrain itself to a particular people or identity, Māoriland casts a deliberately wide net across Indigenous communities, highlighting the intersectional experiences of Native language movements in Eire and the Sakha Republic, and the parallel struggles for political self-determination in Palestine and Hawaiʻi. Yet perhaps more deeply, Māoriland’s non-hierarchical, crowd-sourced method for mapping Te Ao Taketake, in which communities place themselves on the map rather than being drawn by an external authority, reflects the decentred inclusivity and experimental open-endedness of its programming, where clear boundaries and expectations are diffused to leave space for fluid practices of Native self-determination.

Māoriland has a tradition of starting the festival with a pōwhiri (a formal welcoming ceremony) at Raukawa Marae, followed by a keynote at Rangiātea Anglican Church and the festival’s opening night screening at Ngā Purapura, Ōtaki’s main community centre. Taken together with the short geographic distance between festival venues, this centralisation of faith and cultural protocol grounds Māoriland intensely within its community, whose cafes, restaurants, and pubs become touchstones for festival participants circuiting up and down Ōtaki’s Main Street.

Kōkā

The 2025 keynote was delivered by director Kath Akuhata-Brown (Ngāti Porou), whose feature debut Kōkā premiered as the opening night film. Kōkā centres on the relationship between Hamo (Hinetu Dell, Ngāti Porou), a kuia (female elder) grappling with late-stage cancer, and Jo (Darneen Christian, Tuhoe, Ngati Kahungunu, Pitcairn Island), a troubled young woman living on the margins with a makeshift family. Their seemingly disparate lives literally collide when Hamo hits Jo with her Ford Falcon and the younger woman unexpectedly steals her car. Jo is immediately apprehended by the police, but Hamo refuses to press charges after seeing the young woman freshly covered in bruises on the witness stand. Drawn together by these unexpected circumstances and a surprising bond of intergenerational care, the pair begin a road trip down to Hamo’s whenua (land) as a process of healing and cultural rediscovery. The film is haunted by spectres of intergenerational trauma, police brutality, homelessness and dispossession, while its dark undertones are counterbalanced by irreverent humour and the charismatic performances of its central cast. Dell, a non-professional actor in her first screen role, grounds her performance with gravity and realism, producing a fascinating contrast with Christian’s heightened turn and excellent comedic timing. At face value, the tonal differences between these two performances should not work, but Akuhata-Brown’s deft direction not only knits them together but uses their juxtaposition to extraordinary effect. Kōkā’s funniest and most moving moments emerge from the fissures between these two personalities and Dell and Christian’s strong performances. 

Part way through Kōkā, after their car breaks down on the coast, Hamo shows Jo how to prepare kererū, a protected species of pigeon, but instructs her never to eat it again as it is considered a taonga (cultural treasure) by Māori.¹ Hamo handles the kererū with extraordinary care and delicacy, sharing a moment of personal and spiritual intimacy between the two women in a sequence inspired by Akuhata-Brown’s memories of her own mother. Part of the beauty of Māoriland is its capacity to collapse the distance between artist and work by allowing filmmakers to frame their projects and give glimpses into the treasured moments and meanings cradled within each film. In her keynote, Akuhata-Brown narrated her life’s trajectory, from her childhood relationship with her hard-working father to her early experiences as a journalist and her struggles within a Pākehā-dominated media industry. This generous invitation into her life and creative practice contextualised the film’s often dreamlike plot, filling in the gaps within its narrative and sharing its treasures with the audience.

Māoriland’s wide selection of animated films reworked the lives of their authors in other ways. Pow!, a short by Joey Clift (Cowlitz) recalls the director’s childhood memories as a disinterested gamer at an intertribal powwow. The film centres on a Native American boy disengaged from the celebration roiling around him and far more interested in his handheld gaming console, until he’s thrown into a side-scrolling adventure through the powwow in a desperate effort to recharge its failing battery. Blending hand-drawn and 8-bit animation styles with an inclusive and upbeat message on cultural participation, Pow! is endearing, tightly constructed and thoroughly enjoyable viewing. Moving in a similar direction, Mukha (Alexander Moruo, Sakha Republic) follows Nyukku, a young Yakutia girl who joins her family on her first Munkha, a Sakha ice lake fishing tradition. Excited to join her family for the first time but barbed by her older brother, Nyukku packs her favourite ‘magical’ mittens but loses one of them in the frozen lake, eventually recovering it with the help of her community. Mukha is gloriously animated – the wool textures on Nyukku’s mittens alone are astonishingly detailed – and the film is charming and accessible to young audiences.

These films are nestled within Māoriland’s expansive shorts program, which arguably serves as the festival’s backbone. Due to the prohibitive costs of narrative feature film production, shorts and documentaries continue to make up the bulk of global Indigenous cinema, but these formats often provide greater flexibility in form and production process for their filmmakers.² Thrillingly, short film programs forge unexpected connections between the experiences and lifeworlds of seemingly disparate communities from across the world: Haudenosaunee/Mohawk filmmaker Katsitsionni D Fox’s documentary short Kanenon:we – Original Seeds traces how Haudenosaunee women conserve and repurpose heirloom seedstock of traditional crops, while Seeds of Unity (Vandana Shiva and Libby Hakaraia) documented similar practices among Māori communities through the Papawhakaritorito Charitable Trust. Produced independently from one another, Kanenon:we – Original Seeds and Seeds of Unity highlight shared struggles over Indigenous food sovereignty, and the urgency of ecological preservation in the face of global climate crises.

Re-imagining Our Futures: Birthing

Two films stood out as particular highlights in this shorts section. Re-imagining Our Futures: Birthing (Kimberley Benjamin, Yawuru, Bardi and Kija) explored Nyikina and Jabirr Jabirr woman Kalinda (Gal) Palmer’s experiences as a First Nations woman in the Western medical system, and the feelings of alienation and shame she experienced giving birth while separated from Country. The film grapples with extraordinarily difficult content as Palmer describes the trauma of an earlier miscarriage and her drive to give birth on the banks of the Martuwarra River in Nyikina Country, but handles these complexities respectfully and unobtrusively. Palmer generously shares moments of vulnerability with the audience, from revisiting traumatic memories within the cold, clinical confines of a modern hospital bed, to burying her son Jalmarra’s placenta under a larrkardiy (boab) tree on Country. Director Kimberley Benjamin captures these moments with extraordinary sensitivity, deftly choosing what to represent – and what to leave hidden – within Women’s Business. Re-imagining Our Futures: Birthing is a remarkable invitation into the most intimate parts of a human being broken apart by the traumas of loss and colonisation, and their struggle to rebuild through intergenerational love and connection to Country.

The second highlight, Wait, Wait, Now! (Ramon Te Wake, Te Rarawa), takes a different tone. Inspired by director Ramon Te Wake’s own experiences, the short follows two teenagers – one Māori, the other Pakeha – in the 1980s, who dress in drag when their parents are out for the night. Their joy in the performance is counterbalanced by the constant threat of discovery and the possibility that their parents return early—a familiar anxiety for queer people made worse by the contemporary vilification of trans and gender-diverse people in the West. Although Wait, Wait, Now! plays into these familiar anxieties, the film is ultimately redemptive. Enclosed in their imagined world, the two teenagers let down their guard and are caught by their parents; rather than scold them, the adults ask to see their performance. The decision to hinge the film’s climax on familial acceptance rather than exclusion and to frame gender-diverse expression as a source of euphoria rather than pain is highly successful, and makes Wait, Wait, Now! an especially cathartic and joyful experience for queer viewers.

Part of the marvel of Māoriland is its capacity to punctuate its programming with pockets of unexpected pleasure. Ōtaki has long been a hub for Indigenous cultural and linguistic revitalisation and is home to the Māori tertiary institute Te Wānanga o Raukawa, and the town has a large number of native Te reo Māori speakers—including many children and families. As a result, Māoriland’s substantial whānau (family) program occupies a central position within the festival, with many screenings and spaces deliberately structured to accommodate young audiences. The festival’s centrepiece screening was a Shrek (Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson, 2001) that was painstakingly translated and re-recorded into Te reo Māori, with localised references to the sulphurous smells of Rotorua among other regional inside jokes. But beyond the films themselves, the intergenerational co-presence of children, elders and visiting filmmakers instils a sense of vitality and vibrancy within the event as a whole.

Standing Above the Clouds

These touches of levity are ultimately necessary to offset the sometimes oppressive weight of the festival’s subject matter. Jalena Keane-Lee’s Standing Above the Clouds, awarded Best Documentary, presented an intimate portrait of activist Pua Case and her daughters as they work to protect the sacred mountain of Mauna Kea from the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope at its summit. For more than a decade, peaceful demonstrations at Mauna Kea guided by principles of aloha ‘āina (patriotism, love of the land) and kapu aloha (culturally-grounded non-violent resistance) have anchored the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement and provided international visibility for Indigenous land rights struggles in the archipelago, but these struggles have also had substantial impacts on the personal lives and wellbeing of kiaʻi mauna (guardians of the mountain).³ Standing Above the Clouds sensitively interweaves the public and private dimensions of the Mauna Kea protests, drawing upon substantial original footage captured from within the encampment during key moments of the demonstration – from the public arrest of kūpuna (elders) blocking the access road to the sharing of lei with Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) police officers. Yet the film’s most intensely impactful passages happen in private spaces away from Mauna Kea, as demonstrators struggle with the psychological toll of long-term resistance and the grinding insurmountability of governmental authority. Tightly constructed by editor Diana Diroy and counterbalanced by extraordinary landscape cinematography of the mountainside, Standing Above the Clouds is an essential, utterly devastating portrait of a key turning point in recent Hawaiian history.

Part of what makes Māoriland Film Festival exceptional is its capacity for intimate and unexpected collisions. It houses and celebrates global Indigenous cinema without collapsing differences between various films and voices. And while its programming stretches across vast distances, its films are sometimes screened in improvised theatres built into the Ōtaki Senior Citizens Hall, or in local community centres. By building these connections and insisting upon intimacy, kindness and reciprocity in the exhibition process, Māoriland not only stages an alternative body of (Indigenous) work, but also reframes how a festival can engage with the works it presents. Māoriland remains a treasure of the international film festival circuit, and should be protected at all costs.

Māoriland Film Festival
26  – 30 March 2025
https://mff.maorilandfilm.co.nz/

Endnotes