A story about a rebellious trio of girls railing against the system in 1950s New Zealand, Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu’s debut feature film is released nationwide August 22.
THREE KEY FACTS
We Were Dangerous won the Special Jury Prize at SXSW 2024, and premiered at the Auckland launch of NZIFF.
A fictional story, it follows a group in an institution for delinquent girls in 1950s New Zealand.
Josephine Stewart-Tewhiu’s film will be released nationwide on August 22, 2024.
Emma Gleason is the Herald’s lifestyle and entertainment deputy editor.
OPINION
Kiwi film We Were Dangerous premiered at the Auckland opening night of Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival. The feature debut of Josephine Stewart-Tewhiu – backed by executive producer Taika Waititi – tells a striking story of three rebellious teenage girls railing against the system. It couldn’t come at a better time, writes Emma Gleason, who attended opening night.
It’s New Zealand and it’s 1954. Teenage girls have been relocated to a small island in the hope that the isolation, hard work and distance from temptation will transform them into good, God-fearing mothers.
The pretense is grim, depicting institutionalised care and the effects of systemic trauma, but the film isn’t.
We Were Dangerous, the debut feature film of Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu (Ngāpuhi, Te Rarawa), is a story of “resilience and joy,” she told the audience at the Civic on Wednesday night – a crowd that included Auckland mayor Wayne Brown, Hon Paul Goldsmith (minister for arts, culture and heritage, and Treaty of Waitangi negotiations) and the festival’s new artistic director Paolo Bertolin.
“It’s about rebelling, girlhood, seeing ourselves onscreen,” Stewart-Te Whiu explained ahead of the premiere.
Looking back at our nation’s past and rendering it in the medium of film is one of the powers of moviemaking, and local work is a focus for this year’s programme, Bertolin said.
We Were Dangerous opened the Auckland leg of Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival – a significant honour, 2023′s was Oscar-winner Anatomy of a Fall – and Stewart-Te Whiu’s picture is being released into a country that’s grappling with how we handled “problems” in the past, let alone now.
It opens with a voiceover evangelising about the colonial vision of betterment, establishing the framework for ideology and administrative scaffolding that created institutions like the film’s fictional Te Motu: School For Incorrigible And Delinquent Girls.
Rima Te Wiata and Erana James butt heads at the reform school for teenage girls.
We soon learn the proselytising is that of the matron; played by the esteemed Rima Te Wiata (Ngāti Raukawa ki te Tonga), she gives a masterfully layered performance of rage, resentment and comedic beats. She’s a victimiser, but the story suggests she’s been a victim too. More than once we see the men above her delivering their mandates, and she in turn wields her marginal power over the teenagers in her charge.
Having the narration come from the matron, rather than the girls, is a canny choice.
Her clipped, Anglicised elocution calls to mind a Blyton-esque era of children’s media, contrasting strikingly with the message she’s delivering about civilisation, religious salvation, sexual deviance and submission.
The girls are a motley crew of misfits, all deemed unacceptable by society and in need of “reform”, and a rebellious trio are our protagonists: Nellie - played by Erana James (Ngāti Whātua o Ōrākei, Waikato Tainui); Daisy; Manaia Hall (Ngāi Tūhoe, Ngāti Manawa, Ngāti Pūkenga); and Lou, played by Nathalie Morris.
Lou (Nathalie Morris), Nellie (Erana James) and Daisy (Manaia Hall) share a cold, leaky hut at the reform school, but find comfort in each other.
All turn in strong performances, striking notes of rage and seething, teenage sarcasm, tender care and jubilant silliness. James is particularly sensational, with magnetic gravitas, and Nellie drives the plot most – stubbornly refusing to submit, uncovering the truth, and hatching an escape from the horrors that await them in the island’s medical hut.
Though the brutality, punishment and humiliation of Te Motu aren’t shied away from, the filmmakers avoid the voyeurism common with this genre. They don’t need to show us violence and trauma. It’s a smart move that makes the (fictional) story more powerful. Because we all know what went on in institutions like this.
They make space for joy too – small moments of freedom that build hope, like exuberant dancing when the girls “do rock and roll” – and girlhood is treated with a kind of reverence.
Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu’s film is about joy, freedom and girlhood.
It’s a visually beautiful film, lensed by cinematographer María Inés Manchego, and the quality and detail of the sets, production design (Miro Harré) and costumes (Daisy Marcuzzi) build an immersive experience.
You can feel the scratchy blankets and thick stockings; the peeling paint and cold desks.
The scenery is stunning too, a dramatic South Island landscape with big, lonely skies, and the picturesque backdrop amplifies the harrowing reality the girls experience.
Filming took place at Ōtamahua Island in Lyttelton Harbour, and the filmmakers collaborated closely with Te Hapū o Ngāti Wheke about working with the whenua.
Stewart-Te Whiu, writer Maddie Dai and producers Morgan Waru (Ngāti Porou) and Polly Fryer have created a tight film (83 minutes) and this brevity makes what is packed in all the more powerful.
That restrained approach is also applied to world-building. The girls’ social context is visualised, implied or euphemised. A sign in the school calligraphically proclaims “from barbarism to domestication”; another “English only”.
They’re being trained to be wives and mothers, until the decision makers that run things decide that may be a fruitless endeavour and seek an alternative course of action (a major catalyst for the film’s plot).
Colonial attitudes to women and the concept of “civilising” are the foundation of Dai’s script. “We find the girls at a time when Christianity and notions of civilised society become central controlling structures; through abstinence education, state-sponsored morality, and an assault on everything,” Dai has said of the film.
The story's Te Motu School For Incorrigible And Delinquent Girls is located on an island previously used for lepers, the film tells us, and these adolescent outcasts also grapple with isolation and oppression.
It’s a film about rebellion, and it asks what happens if you don’t submit, fall in line or follow orders.
There weren’t many other options for women in the 1950s, societal expectations were even narrower, and change is slow.
By 1961 you could get the contraceptive pill, but only if you were married. For single women and Māori, buying a home was impossibly hard.
The Ministry of Women’s Affairs wasn’t established until 1985, when we also got our first Māori governor-general Sir Paul Reeves and the Homosexual Law Reform Bill was introduced to parliament – historic events that unfolded the same year New Zealand produced its first major science fiction film, The Quiet Earth, a post-apocalyptic man-alone story about a scientist (Bruno Lawrence) waking up to find he seems to be the only person alive.
Films are a sign of the times, nothing is created out of a vacuum, or released into one.
