1.
Waru
2017; Briar Grace-Smith, Casey Kaa, Ainsley Gardiner, Katie Wolfe, Renae Maihi, Chelsea Winstanley, Paula Whetu Jones, and Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu and Awanui Simich-Pene

This movie is made up of eight scenes, each 10 minutes long, and each created by different Maori woman film-makers. All the scenes are presented as a single take, in real-time, starting at the same moment: 09.59. Together they form a composite around the funeral of Waru, a Maori boy who has died in mysterious circumstances. Astonishingly, it's the first feature film to be made by Maori women in almost 30 years...

Through the eight very different vignettes, we watch various members of the community struggling to come to terms with the tragedy, or facing circumstances where other potential tragedies loom. The question of guilt recurs in several pieces: "We all could have done more," says one character.

Ken Derry sums up the overall message very effectively: "The main point here... is that the killer is not so much a single person as it is a social condition, an oppressive history. The killer is colonialism, patriarchy, poverty, alcoholism; it is a struggle with self-worth, a loss of tradition and meaning."


East Cape, New Zealand, 2002

Inevitably, every individual viewer will find some scenes particularly affecting. These were my stand-outs:

The first segment features Charm (Tanea Heke), a matriarchal figure, currently supervising the catering for Waru's tangi. She's rock-solid, tough, down-to-earth, and capable. We learn that she has played protective roles in the past, preventing other tragedies.

The segment about Mihi (Ngapaki Moetara) was really moving. She's a mother of four, alone, and totally without resources. Her attempts to get through to Work and Income to ask for help leave her high and dry in the kind of automated phone service we've all learned to know and hate.

Ainsley Gardiner, who made this section, explains how it was informed by her own experiences: "I have spent years on the DPB [Domestic Purposes Benefit], where my whole spirit was broken. I was demoralised, my way of seeing the world altered. And while I was lucky enough to have a middle-class education and knew that despite my misery I was not a lost cause, while I had my imagination and storytelling that allowed me to retain hope, and though I was surrounded by friends and family, I felt very alone in my struggle."

At one point, one of the daughters asks Mihi: "What’s your superpower, Mom?" "Invincibility," she replies. The youngest daughter wants to know what that means, and her older sister misinforms her: "It means no one can see her." A brilliant bit of dialogue. Poverty makes you invisible until it drives you to do something really awful.

But there's a bit of hope in this segment. The neighbour that Mihi has seen as nosy and judgemental instead comes through for her, bringing her some petrol and a bag of food, and offering to see to the now screaming baby.

Actually, there's hope in many of the segments, as women of different ages and situations decide to change, or find the power to push back.



Some critics found the segment about Kiritapu (Maria Walker), the broadcaster who eventually speaks out on air against her vilely racist colleague, a little too lurid. I don't know... I've definitely heard stuff like that said...

The spiritual power of the ancestors is evoked several times. The confrontation between Waru's two great-grandmothers (Kararaina Rangihau and Merehake Maaka) reflects a ritual that I didn't totally understand, but there's clearly a power in it: "A bone for a bone... A treasure for a treasure." (All the deeper meaning of which is contemptuously tossed off by the news broadcast as "iwi versus iwi in this bizarre case of body-snatching".) The great-grandmothers at the tangi are aware of the way the settlers corrupted Maori culture, but do not shirk responsibility: "Perhaps we are both to blame. We both did not teach our descendants the way of our people." Also drawing on spiritual power, Mere (Acacia Hapi) finds in her late grandma's supernaturally charged tokotoko the courage to challenge the terrible cabal made up of people who abuse and people who fail to stop them: "Why didn't you stop it? Why?... How many have to die before you say 'enough'?"

As though to underline the need for spirit-inspired action rather than talk, the last segment presents Titti and Bash (Amber Curreen and Miriama McDowell), who are out on a rescue mission, urged on by the voice of the dead child. The sisters' plan is obviously fraught with danger, and we don't the outcome. But someone is doing something... Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu, a co-writer of this section, says: "I imagined these women as a storm, moving up the country, loud and unapologetic, cleansing and bringing change."

This was sometimes an uncomfortable watch, but it memorably puts forward a message that needs to be conveyed, given New Zealand's horrible record on child abuse.



2.
Hava, Maryam, Ayesha
Sahraa Karimi
2019

Only one film-maker this time, but in three roughly 25-minute segments, she focuses on the lives of three individual Afghan women. The film blazes a trail as "the first independent Afghan movie entirely shot in Kabul with cast and crew living in Afghanistan".

Kabul. Winter. We meet Hava (Arezoo Ariapoor) first. She's pregnant, but lives the life of a drudge, constantly at the beck and call of her ghastly father-in-law and even ghastlier husband, with an incapacitated mother-in-law to look after into the bargain. It's a simple household, and every household chore involves a huge expenditure of labour. Hava's labour. As we close this section, she feels as though something is going wrong with the pregnancy, but the dreadful husband is too taken up with his guests to respond.

The second woman is Maryam (Fereshta Afshar). She's clearly from a higher income bracket, and has a beautiful flat, and a good job in broadcasting (although her boss's suggestion that she might like to take on an advertising sideline shows that sexism is still a regular part of her environment). But she too has a toerag for a husband. Over the seven years of their marriage, he has regularly cheated on her. She has broken free, but now he wants her back. She is clear that this is not going to happen, but her situation is complicated by the fact that she is expecting his child -- and by the fact that she obviously feels terribly sad about the loss of her marital dreams (she even digs out her old wedding dress and puts it on).

The teenage Ayesha (Hasiba Ebrahimi), whose family lives next door to Hawa, is the third character we meet. Her mother Belqeis (Sabera Sadat) lost her husband in an attack by a suicide bomber, and her precarious economic situation means that she is desperate to marry Ayesha off to her cousin Sulaiman (Faisal Noor). Ayesha's problem is that she's in love with someone else, and is pregnant by him. But unfortunately, he has disappeared...

The film's final shot brings these three women together in the gynaecologist's waiting-room, their varying expectations of their pregnancies hanging heavily over them.



The movie is very much a feminist statement: "These tales are about the frustration of not being heard and respected, the exasperation of not having a voice, not having a say. Hava, Maryam and Ayesha’s dreams have been trampled over, their dignity disregarded, their desires ignored. They have no power to influence or make a decision about anything, even Maryam, who seems to be the most emancipated of the three, had to make her decisions as a consequence of the husband’s behaviour."

Not all the film's men are evil, though. Young Akbar (Modaser Amiri), Ayesha's brother, is the only one in Hava's little world to show her any compassion, and Sulaiman seems a decent young man, who is keen to know whether Ayesha really wants the marriage that's being arranged for her (she obviously doesn't).

As you watch this movie, with the question-mark it hangs over all three of its protagonists, you also wonder, of course, about its creator. Sahraa Karimi is the child of refugees, who fled Afghanistan when the Russians invaded. She was born in south Tehran, but while she was still young, her father died, so it was her strong, hard-working mother who supported the family. Her favourite authors included Virginia Woolf and none other than Marguerite Duras... (seriously, that woman is always cropping up...)

Karimi was the first young Afghan woman to play a role in Iranian cinema (starring in 2000 in Mariam Shahriar's Daughters of the Sun). But she was keen to leave Iran, and seized the opportunity the following year, when she was invited to Bratislava along with other members of the film cast. She contrived to stay on there, and studied filmmaking, becoming the only Afghan woman to obtain a PhD in that discipline.

Karimi fled Kabul in 2021 when the Taliban forces retook the city, documenting as she went. She now lives in exile in Rome.

Needless to say, Afghan cinema is now a very different animal...



3.
Vai
2019; Nicole and Sharon Whippy, Ofa-Ki-Levuka Guttenbeil-Likiliki, Matasila Freshwater, Amberley Jo Aumua, Miria George, Marina Alofagia McCartney, Dianna Fuemana, and Becs Arahanga

Like Waru (and conceived by the same producers, Kerry Warkia and Kiel McNaughton), this portmanteau film is made up of eight segments by different female film-makers, who are all connected with different Pacific island cultures. Rather than focusing on a single event, Vai focuses on eight stages in a woman's life.


Fiji, 2005

At first it's a little confusing, as the central character not only looks very different in the successive segments, but also seems to be in different countries, speaking different languages (over the length of the movie, scenes are set in Fiji, Tonga, Solomon Islands, Kuki Airani, Samoa, Niue, and twice in Aotearoa). But you soon realize that Vai is actually the Pacific Everywoman.

She's the girl who gets left behind when her mum goes to New Zealand; the girl who longs to be a singer, but has to spend her spare time collecting water for her grandma; the girl who has to readjust to her mother's presence when she comes back (or perhaps doesn't...); the young woman who has to study while working various jobs to bring in money for herself and her family back home; the young woman who has to speak out against the problem of over-fishing; the older woman who has to convince her granddaughter of the need to "go but return"; the women of various ages who find themselves guardians of ritual for family and community -- these are the stories of so many women across the Pacific.

Connecting the segments, too, is the theme of water (the word "vai", in different guises, means "water" in many Pacific languages -- and indeed in Austronesian languages more generally, as you can see from this fascinating video from Brian Loo Soon Hua).

As Dennis Harvey points out, "A steady undercurrent of historical loss and sacrifice runs throughout action that otherwise ranges widely between the realistic and allegorical... Vai very much captures the paradisiacal aspects of South Seas island life that have enraptured arrivistes for centuries. But without resorting to explicit political rhetoric, this handsome collaboration never lets us forget that the toll exacted on native peoples by such outsiders has been great."