This Way of Life

Shot over four years, This Way of Life is an intimate portrait of Peter Karena and his family.

This Way of Life, New Zealand, 2010

Director: Tom Burstyn
Producer/Screenplay: Barbara Sumner Burstyn
Photography: Tom Burstyn
Editor: Cushla Dillon
Music: Joel Haines
Narrator: Llewelyn Karena

With: Peter Karena, Colleen Karena, the Karena children

DV, 85 minutes, Exempt

Shot over four years, This Way of Life is an intimate portrait of Peter Karena and his family. Masterful in the saddle and Hollywood handsome, Peter lives by an internal code of values and honor largely lost in modern times. He is a horse-whisperer, philosopher, hunter, and builder, a husband and father. Despite seemingly overwhelming challenges, Peter refuses to compromise.
Peter’s wife Colleen Karena (Ngati Maniapoto) is the keeper of her family’s taonga tuku iho (heritage). A true matriarch, Colleen sees family as the center of the universe and mothering as the world’s most important job. As the film progresses, we discover her quiet exterior conceals a profound and beautifully articulated approach to parenting resulting in the physical competence and emotional openness of her children.
The film portrays the intimate life of the Karena family. In their early 30’s, Peter and Colleen have six kids and 50 horses. We follow them up into the Ruahine ranges and down to their hidden beach camp. Against these isolated backdrops we explore family relationships, their connection to nature, their keen survival skills and their absolute intimacy with each other and their horses. In This Way of Life, the Karenas unite their philosophy with their circumstances, turning hardship into a meaningful and satisfying life.

"A collision of realities - earthly nature vs. human nature - lies at the very big heart of This Way of Life, catapulting this Kiwi-made story of a Maori family beyond mere portraiture and into a realm of metaphysics, melancholia and cosmic doubt: At the ends of the Earth, in a virtual Eden, is it possible for a family to live without petty grudges, anger, violence and authoritarian rule? There are no easy answers in this gloriously photographed film, but the questions it poses - and its attractive, unconventional subjects - should help it find a life beyond the festival circuit. The Ottley Karena family - Peter, Colleen and their six children (one of whom is born during the filming) - live a near-Rousseau-like existence in remote northern New Zealand, in a ramshackle house that has been home to seven generations of Peter's family. Freshly killed game provides the meat for meals, and how it gets there is a process the kids take part in. The children - all beautiful, capable and daring - ride horses almost as well as they walk, and are loved by their parents. They have no needs and few desires; they're cherubic barbarians. Naturally, everything is about to go wrong. There's a certain lack of narrative clarity, or expansiveness at least, in helmer Thomas Burstyn and scribe Barbara Sumner Burstyn's storytelling that obscures the details. What seems clear is that Peter's unseen father is selling the house out from under them; thuggish men claiming to have bought the place, and its extensive acreage, come to extort rent money. It's not quite clear why this is happening; nor is it evident what exactly the conflict is between Peter and the man he calls his father, although there are questions about Peter's paternity; the gnarled family tree from which Peter fell may have been too confusing to sort out properly without a whole other movie. Still, there's no question that intergenerational acrimony exists, and when the Ottley Karenas go out one day and their house catches fire, no one blames bad wiring. Amid this domestic/political hell, the filmmakers present the day-to-day lifestyle of the family in what is otherwise a virtual paradise: Forced out of their old charred house, the family finds an even more beautiful place near the ocean, where their numerous horses can run and be stabled. The kids don't have a house, exactly - they move into what's more of a shed - but they seem happy, as do their parents, except for the specter of Peter's father, whose wrath seems to know no limits. Fatherhood itself is a major issue for This Way of Life; during one extended sequence, Peter describes each of his children in such loving detail that one can hardy doubt the wisdom of the family's lifestyle, at least as it concerns parenting. It looks like domestic genius when contrasted with Peter's extended family. Those various parents and siblings are all but invisible, except for a semi-surreptitious interview that occurs late in the film with Peter's father, who comes off as brutish and self-pitying. What he represents for the viewer in a macro sense is the cloud in the otherwise azure sky of Peter and Colleen's rustic, child-filled life. Tech credits are good, especially Thomas Burstyn's shooting, although the dialogue (already hard to understand for non-Kiwis due to the subjects' accents) is occasionally obscured by household noise." - Variety

" In this captivating, visually ravishing doco, we watch Peter and his wife Colleen over an eventful four years as they do whatever it takes to provide emotional security and a life in harmony with nature for their six children. As charismatic a subject as any filmmaker could ask for, Peter makes ends meet as a horse-whisperer, builder and hunter. Seeing the children riding bareback through the East Coast dunes or astride a horse moving up a river with their father is like glimpsing the infancy of the classical gods. (Yes, Tom Burstyn’s cinematography is that remarkable.) But is such glorious freedom, a respect for nature and the abundant love of family all a child needs? Never evangelical, Peter and Colleen talk with unassuming vitality about the values they are instilling in their children. You might well leave their company persuaded that the parents of the future should be getting to know horses now." —  New Zealand Film Festival

Screenings: This Way of Life screened in a 2-week season from 26 January to 5 February 2011