Te Rua

Te Rua is an awesomely impressive achievement. And the most important thing about it may just be its insistence that it tells its story on its own terms. We would all do well to listen

Te Rua, New Zealand, 1991

Pacific Films
Writer/director: Barry Barclay
Producer: John O’Shea
Executive producer (Berlin): Renee Gundelach
Associate producer: Craig Walters
Director of photography: Rory O’Shea (Berlin), Warrick Attewell (New Zealand)
Editors: Simon Reece, Dell King
Music: Dalvanius
Sound editors: Kit Rollings, Mike Hopkins
Art directors: Ron Highfield, Thomas Schappert, Michael Tonke
Maori dialogue & Haka: Huirangi Waikerepuru

With: Wi Kuki Kaa (Rewi Marangai), Peter Kaa (Peter Huaka), Matiu Mareikura (Taki Ruru), Nissie Herewini (Nanny Matai), Tilly Reedy (Mere Marangai), Gunter Meisner (Professor Biederstedt), \Donna Akersten (Fiona Gilbert), Stuart Devenie (Hamish MacMillan), Maria Fitzi (Hanna Lehmann), Walter Kreye (Dr. Sattler), Anton Rattinger (Gunter Schever), Jurgen Thormann (Dierter Goetz), Vanessa Rare (Helen Marangai), Dalvanius (Dr Waru)

35mm, 94 minutes, PG

A hundred years after the theft from New Zealand of three irreplaceable tribal carvings, two members of the Maori tribe decide it’s time for ancient grievances to be put right. Both men are in Germany, where the carvings are stored in a great Berlin museum. Rewi Marangai (a successful lawyer) has been working on a patent case. Peter Huaka (a performance poet) is on a European tour. They first meet when Peter is detained in the museum, where he has been causing turmoil about the stolen carvings. They meet again in New Zealand, where Peter is recruiting helpers for his campaign to bring the carvings back home. Rewi at first refuses to participate, but changes his mind when an old woman of the tribe (Nanny Matai) orders him to lead the group to Germany. In Berlin, Peter’s plans go awry; when his group breaks into the museum, they are confronted by the museum authorities. Rewi persuades the others to let him put his own, more daring plan into action. Tensions build, and international media interest broadens when a sniper’s bullet hits Peter. At home, the people of the tribe gather to await news, and Nanny Matai begins a vigil for her tribe’s carvings. Her fate and the return of the carvings are in the balance…

“Te Rua overflows with ideas, argument, anecdote and provocation and its contours are certainly more ragged than those of Barclay’s earlier Ngati. In a film as richly populated as this, it’s inappropriate to isolate individual performers for praise. Suffice to say, the Maori players invest Te Rua with resounding pride and passion.” — New Zealand Film Festival, 1991

“… At least as interesting as the story, however, is the way it is told. This picture actually marks quite a stylistic breakthrough for New Zealand film in that Barclay has managed to appropriate the technical apparatus of cinema into the Maori oral storytelling tradition. I have one lingering objection to Te Rua’s narrative content. I cannot accept on face value Barclay’s somewhat glib assumption that Western culture is so lacking in its own spirituality, that it envies that of other cultures. But granted, five centuries of colonialism have bred an insufferable arrogance, and a tendency to relegate other peoples’ sacred totems to the status of objects, to be collected and displayed with no thought to their rightful context. Ultimately, Te Rua debates the rights and wrongs of this situation with some power and conviction. It is an important film, another vital step in the evolution of a unique indigenous cinema.” — Costa Botes, The Dominion, 25/11/91

“Debate over the repatriation of plundered indigenous art is not new, but it may be only just getting underway. Te Rua is in no doubt whatsoever about where its Maori tribal carvings, stored in the basement of a Berlin museum, truly belong. That certainty is expressed in bold, eloquent strokes – as the film opens, the tiny seaside community of Uritoto, from which the carvings have long been wrested, is photographed (beautifully, by Warwick Attewell) in an atmosphere of overcast agitation. It rains incessantly; the sea heaves mournfully about the rocks. Two sons of the tribe have coincided in Berlin and it’s as if their closeness to the carvings has opened old wounds on this side of the world. Exactly how carvings and equanimity will be restored is not so simple. Barclay’s constantly surprising thriller plot imagines what radical action might be appropriate. He regales us with a whole range of the attitudes which render this subject contentious and make corrective action almost farcically awkward. The events in Berlin are complicated by bureaucracy, do-gooders, professional activists, and tactical differences between the militant young and their canny elders. Obversely, Te Rua is about the white patronage of Maori interests. There’s invigorating insolence in the parallels Barclay draws between the white knights who assist the Maori cause and the white museum management who oppose it. Pakeha crave Maori-ness in this film in subtly different ways. The most enlightened know this about themselves, none more so than the outrageous Professor Biederstedt, German custodian of the carvings. Te Rua overflows with ideas, argument and provocation and its contours are certainly more jagged than those of Barclay’s earlier Ngati In a film as richly populated as this, it’s inappropriate to isolate individual performers to praise. Suffice to say, the Maori players invest Te Rua with resounding pride and passion.” — New Zealand Film Festival, 1991

“Ancient grievances spawn distinctly modern attempts at redress in the second feature by Maori film-maker Barry Barclay, whose 1987 film Ngati charmed with its poetic and gentle simplicity. This time, though, there’s a fire in the belly as writer-director Barclay addresses the vexed question of ownership and control of indigenous artefacts. Even in the wake of the wonderful Te Maori exhibition which brought the word taonga into Pakeha vocabulary, Te Rua seems almost brutally uncompromising to Pakeha eyes. Yet its remorseless logic (on both dramatic and political levels) is irresistible. Its central characters in terms of screen time are Rewi Marangai and his relative Peter Huaka. Both, though, are subordinate to an old kuia, Nanny Matai, who speaks only in Maori and is the only one who knows the burial place of one of her tribe who assisted a thief a century ago to spirit away carvings from the meeting-house of the fictional Uritoto tribe. The two men are in Berlin – the elder now a successful lawyer with big corporate clients and the younger a fashionable performance poet – where the carvings now rest on their sides in undignified and crated storage in a museum basement. The two conspire to effect the carvings’ return, using and being used by a German-based action group, but ultimately maintaining control over the process of negotiation in the same way as they seek control of the treasures. Te Rua is a problematic work, not least because it rejects narrative formulas in favour of a style where the unifying threads are spiritual rather than dramatic, which results in an occasionally breathtaking incoherence (although it gains in fluency in the second half to become a taut and engrossing thriller). And it is littered with irritating infelicities such as the decision to subtitle Maori speech but have Germans speaking mangled war-comic dialect to each other. Yet there is no denying the raw power of Barclay’s vision and its amplification by Dalvanius’ perfect score and the photography by Rory O’Shea in Berlin and Warwick Attewell here (the Uritoto marae, built for the film, is set on the Wairarapa cost). Scenes such as Rewi’s homecoming shine with a lyrical beauty, and the greetings delivered by several characters to the carvings have a hair-raising intensity about them. In the end, Te Rua is an awesomely impressive achievement. And the most important thing about it may just be its insistence that it tells its story on its own terms. We would all do well to listen.” — Peter Calder, ‘Te Rua irresistible’, NZ Herald 22/11/91

“The conflict between any peoples of different cultures, genders, races or backgrounds is always going to be difficult to resolve. Barry Barclay’s new film, Te Rua, asks people to look at the fact that there are differences… In Te Rua, the right of indigenous people to retain their own treasures comes up in a struggle to repatriate three Maori carvings housed in a Berlin museum basement. ‘It’s not a film to directly politicise people who do hold these things. But it’s like making films about rape – this time it’s cultural rape, and the rapists don’t understand what they’re doing, or claim they don’t,’ Barclay says. The production had its hassles in getting locations. The museum in Berlin which was to be the location ordered the group off the premises, and they had to set up elsewhere. The National Museum in Wellington would not let the crews film on its steps. But conversely, the Berlin Arts Council invested heavily in the film, knowing it was implicated. The council funds Berlin’s museums, some of them culprits in a worldwide crime that continues even now. While the crew was filming, a load of skulls arrived from South America for the museum’s collection. ‘It doesn’t occur to them the values involved, that a carving might be much more than an artefact,’ Barclay says. The idea that one cultural group has a totally different outlook from another is a subtle message of the film, but it does not look to teach anyone anything, the director says. ‘Many people in New Zealand think they’ve contributed to the Maori renaissance, and one fine day they’re told to go jump in the lake, and it hurts.’ He compares it with the idea that men can sympathise and support, but they can not be part of the women’s struggle. ‘Transposing that across to the Pakeha-Maori thing, it’s sometimes uncomfortable to know as a pakeha, you’re not part of the Maori struggle.’ While he may not agree with some of the policies of the German museums, Barclay was very enthusiastic about the time he spent there. The crew was filming in the new-found freedom after the Berlin Wall came down. ‘We did shoot part of the film in the east. We went to this natural history museum on the fourth floor. And walking up the steps, there was a Greenpeace sticker, right by the door we were going to film. Our art director said a few months ago, you would have got a year in jail for sticking that up. It really hits home to you what’s happening there.’ But in the same museum, there was a roster for cleaning the toilets. Top international scientists took their turn alongside the lowest administrator. And they just accepted it as part of their life.’… In a way, he feels New Zealand and Berlin’s connection is ‘not an idiotic marriage.’ Berlin is an ideas place, willing to let ideas be put forward, brave enough to help raise the issues. ‘And here we are able amongst ourselves to raise the issue.’ But as he pointed out, the film was not just about issues. It also looks at relationships. And families. And it does what he set out to do. Thus far, he feels the screenings have been ‘incredibly well received.’…” — Lee Harris, ‘Cultural differences form core of NZ film’, Otago Daily Times, 19 July 1991

Screenings: Te Rua screened on 10 September 2008 in a season of features by the late film maker Barry Barclay.