Most of the thousands of people who pass the property near the corner of Auckland’s St Lukes and New North roads every day barely see it. It’s not a small place, but it doesn’t really advertise itself to the rumbling traffic. You need to step inside the 151-year-old wooden church to feel its resonance.
“It’s quite quiet and unassuming on the outside,” says the Rev Clare Barrie, who has been the vicar of St Luke’s Anglican Church since 2009, “but it’s beautiful on the inside.”
The church was built in 1872 as the place of worship for the Kerr-Taylor family, who lived up the road in the stately Alberton, at the foot of Mt Albert, and who rest now in the pocket cemetery at the back of the property. Since then, the church itself has become longer and wider, and the site gained a substantial hall, originally a Sunday school, in the 1930s, then a smaller “youth hall” out of sight of the road in the 1950s. More recently, the church complex answered a film-maker’s prayers.
Mysterious Ways is the second feature film by director Paul Oremland and, like the first, 100 Men – a documentary survey of a life of having sex with other men – it works as a potentially confronting theme into a meditation. It’s a love story about a gay vicar and his younger lover, and what breaks loose when they want to be married in the church.
When Oremland approached Barrie about using her church as a location, she says she greeted it as “a really exciting project. St Luke’s is a rainbow church and has been since long before my time – that was always part of this community’s story.”
Thus, the old church, both halls, the cemetery and even the op shop became places in Mysterious Ways. Notably – because it seems like a leap straight into the 2023 round of the culture wars – the film’s big scene is a drag show in the church. Barrie ran that past her bishop. Was life imitating a film in which the bishop, played by a perpetually harried-looking Michael Hurst, desperately doesn’t want to stir the pot?
“I just let him know what was happening,” Barrie says. “I didn’t ask his permission. It was just a no-surprises thing.”
“You said to me at the time that he had asked you, was the script okay?” says Oremland, sitting alongside the vicar in a corner of the old church. “And you said that the script was okay.”
Oremland began working on the idea of Mysterious Ways more than a decade ago, and its road to the screen has not been easy. After a long engagement with the New Zealand Film Commission, it was declined funding and had to be made for $270,000 and not the $1.7 million originally budgeted. Being able to shoot nearly all of it on one location become a budgetary boon and while everyone involved was paid, belief in the script was generally more important than money. British-born actor Richard Short (Mary Kills People, Jack Ryan), who plays Peter, the vicar, insisted on being part of the film even after the film commission money was lost.
Recalls Oremland: “I called him and he said, ‘You get me down there on a business-class flight, pay a little bit of money for my expenses, call me an executive producer on it and I’ll do it.’ His agent said, ‘You’re mad, don’t do it.’”
Most of the other lead roles are filled by Pasifika actors, including Nick Afoa as Peter’s partner, Jason, and Toi Whakaari: NZ Drama School graduate Joe Folau in a breakout role as Jason’s magical, mysterious trans nephew, Billy. Oremland’s main co-writer was playwright and director Dianna Fuemana, and the film’s producer is Ngaire Fuata, who produces Tagata Pasifika for TVNZ.
Oremland was brought up in the Seventh-day Adventist Church and briefly studied to be a preacher before being excommunicated at 18 after he came out. He left for Britain, where his parents were born, and didn’t come back for good until 2010, three decades later.
“There’s a big Pacific congregation in the Adventist Church,” he says. “I just kept seeing the struggle, because of the taboo. Even now, I can go on [gay dating site] Grindr every night, and I’ll see endless Pacific men – you meet this 25-year-old kid who’s full of guilt and he’s got his girlfriend and he’s leading a double life. Faith, however you define it, is important to self-esteem. And if you’re told that you’re sinful, then that is very bad for self-esteem. It leads to some dark things.”
Barrie adds: “Because faith doesn’t stop with intellectual content. That’s important, but it’s also about belonging and identity. So, saying you’re sinful, that’s where that brokenness comes from. It wrecks identity and it wrecks belonging.”
Oremland continues: “Maureen Fepuleai, who plays Billy’s aunt, is a devout Mormon. We did a reading and she was fabulous and brought a genuineness to it. And then we had a conversation and she said, ‘Look, it’s really difficult for me to do this, because of what my church teaches – but I just know how important this is to our people.’”
It’s still a live debate in the Anglican Church, too. In 2018, the national governing body resolved that gay marriages could be blessed in the church – which meant that gay clergy could be married and openly serve. But, just as in the film, the marriage itself cannot take place in the church.
“We’ll get there,” Barrie sighs.
The film missed out selection for this year’s Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival, but it has since picked up screenings around the country, including a premiere at the Rialto in Auckland on August 17, for the same reason that many of its cast and crew got involved – key people liked the story and wanted to help. It has been selected for a British festival and TVNZ has committed to airing it as a Christmas movie (a condition of NZ On Air coming in with $80,000 for post-production).
Ironically, it has struggled to get into gay film festivals in the US, where the lines in the culture war are more sharply drawn. It’s seen as insufficiently hostile to the church, Oremland thinks.
Most of the characters in Mysterious Ways are, just people trying to do their best and not always getting there.
“That’s very church,” Barrie observes. It also reflects real life. Oremland’s late father became friends with his partner, yet, he says, “when he died, virtually the last thing he said to me was, ‘I’m so sad that you’re not going to be with me in heaven.’ Yet I went to his funeral – I had not been back to the Seventh-day Adventist Church since I was excommunicated – and the ritual of the funeral gave closure; it was wonderful for my mum. Why is a wedding important? It’s a ritual, and rituals are important.”
“I think it’s a deeply human thing to need ritual,” says the vicar to the film-maker before they part. “Especially at those life-transition moments. Birth, death, marriage, all those moments are liminal. You transition an identity in some way. And a ritual gives a space and a language to that. It’s like a body memory.”
Mysterious Ways is in selected cinemas from August 17.
