Overview
"You're here to see Mahana? Oh, I've watched it four times already. It's great." In between generously scooping popcorn into our popcorn holders and filling our cokes to the brim we get an enthusiastic and unsolicited review of the newly released Mahana from the popcorn attendant who just can't stop gushing about it. "That's such a good movie", the second movie attendant we encounter wistfully mutters while ripping the top thirds of each our tickets off and signalling our cinema location. Even as a professional reviewer, I begin to feel an unspoken peer pressure to preemptively like the film.
I resist, of course.
Until my encounter with Enthusiastic Reviewer/Cinema Attendant #1 and #2, I had purposively avoided reviews and synopses, only knowing through osmosis and general trivia-level knowledge that Mahana was an adaption of the 1994 novel Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies by Witi Ihimaera (The Whale Rider) and directed by Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors), in order to give the film as clean a slate as possible given the dotted history of both men's works.
One hour and forty-three minutes later I'm dabbing my eyes with my already damp teeshirt sleeve. The credits roll and no one in the theatre budges. It takes a long crescendo of nondescript rustling noises to get us all to finally start filing out of the theatre.
Mahana is the first film made on local soil by Lee Tamahori since his 1994 heartbreaker Once Were Warriors. Originally titled The Patriarch, Tamahori's Mahana takes place in the East Coast of New Zealand and mostly features garden-variety rural occurrences such as a sheep shearing contest, a first love, a wedding and an inter-family rivalry between the Poatas and Mahanas. But the film is greater than the sum of its parts. Veiled behind these everyday and ordinary happenings, as narrated by the 14-year-old Simeon Mahana (Akuhata Keefe), are the arbitrary, destructive powers of the patriarchy and racism in the community. The film explores these through an intimate portrait of the Mahana's dark family history and through brief vignettes (most memorably done where minor Maori youth offenders are lined up in court like cattle to the slaughterhouse and swiftly dealt with by a pale, male and stale judge who prioritises his lunch break over any actual justice).
Mahana a nuanced tearjerker which might leave some audience members hankering for some more action, but which will enthral others entirely to the point of making a pilgrimage back to the cinemas for another watch, or four.
