Mauri

‘The best films will be made not by people with commercial aims but by passionate people whose aims are art and truth.’ (Robert Flahtery) Mauri, is such a film.

Mauri, New Zealand, 1988

Awatea Films
Produced/written/directed by: Merata Mita
Associate Producer: Geoff Murphy
Director of Photography: Graeme Cowley
Camera Operator: Paul Leach
Production Designer: Ralph Hotere
Editor: Nicholas Beauman
Musical Director: Hirini Melbourne
Original Music and Performance by: Amokura

With: Anzac Wallace (Rewi Rapana), Eva Rickard (Kara), James Heyward (Steve), Susan D. Ramari Paul (Ramari), Sonny Waru (Hemi), Rangimarie Delamere (Awatea), Willie Raana (Willie Rapana), Geoff Murphy (Mr Semmens)

35mm, 99 minutes, PG-some content may offend

Rewi Rapana returns to the small country town of Te Mata after his family has left the district. His arrival rekindles old tensions as well as renewing family ties. He is seeking an identity and a permanent place to call home yet desperately hiding a secret from his past. Oddly enough there is one person with whom he finds peace of mind. She is an old woman known as Kara. A special relationship develops between Rewi, Kara and Kara’s great granddaughter Awatea.

“Best known for her fiercely political documentaries, of which Patu! and Bastion Point: Day 507 have been most widely screened, Merata Mita is a film maker whose work bears out the 1926 prediction of pioneer director Robert Flaherty, who said, ‘The best films will be made not by people with commercial aims but by passionate people whose aims are art and truth.’ Mita’s first feature, Mauri, is just such a film. Aspects of it will have Hollywood-tuned eyes and ears perplexed, but for the openminded there is a richness in form and content that no formula-fed narrative can match. Shot by a largely Maori film crew and employing many non-professional Maori actors, the film presents the complex web of relationships in an isolated North Island west coast settlement. Against a backdrop of seasonal changes the rhythms of birth, life and death are unified in the holistic primitiveness of the elements. Air, fire and water feature strongly, but it is the earth that is the centre and the source of the cycle’s rhythms. Land and life force, or mauri, are inextricably linked – visually in Graeme Cowley’s breathtaking cinematography and dramatically in the relationship of the characters to the land. Carrying the allegorical force of the film is the return to the settlement of Rewi, a taciturn man whose memories signal a troubled soul. Neither the love of local woman Ramari nor the support offered by elder Kara can persuade Rewi to unlock his secret past. Notions of birthright, the preciousness of Maori culture and the erosion of it by entrenched Pakeha racism are reflected in the catalystic effect Rewi’s return has on Te Mata. For all the beauty in the images, this is a raw film. Shot for maximum emotional effect, it has several scenes where the passions expressed seem almost too big for the screen. A script which demands a lot of its actors (with very difficult lines often delivered in tight close-up) means that at times the dialogue sounds over-blown. Such details will matter only to the viewer who has not embraced the spirit of Mauri. For the rest, there is a character whose perspective it pays to emulate – the child, Awatea, watches it all with an open mind, and learns.” — Helen Martin, NZ Listener, 9/9/1989

“When a child was born it was normal practise for the afterbirth to be buried in a special family plot. Every family has such a place and the afterbirths of countless generations were returned to the earth in a ritual thousands of years old. This illustrates the bond between the people and the land and is called whenua ki to whenua, whenua being the same word in Maori for afterbirth and land. In the film when Kara’s nephew, Willie, comes home on holiday, she knows he is going to die. This is not premonition, it is certain knowledge. And when he meets his end some two hundred miles away, she responds at the exact same moment of his death. These are not exceptional power when seen in the context of her culture. Kara is part of the tapestry of life woven by those who can still read omens in nature and the landscape, whose insights inherited from the past give them second sight into the future.” — Merata Mita

Screenings: Mauri screened on 27 August 2008