Official Selection, 2019 Venice Film Festival

RESTORED IN 2019 BY THE NEW ZEALAND FILM COMMISSION

There’s a lot of watching in Merata Mita’s landmark MAURI. It’s the 1950s and there’s a storm coming to a once-thriving Maori settlement. Rewi, holding on to an unsettled past, watches the woman he loves (and who loves him back) slip into the arms of a white man. Kara, the town’s elder matriarch, is stirred by the change in the air, of birthrights trembling and a land falling captive. And then there’s Awatea, a young girl standing watch from the circumference of this simmering circle, staring not out of tragedy but of awe, at a Maori life-force re-shuffling off the rippling coasts of the North Island.

Heralded as the first narrative feature directed by an indigenous woman, MAURI should be read as not only a first, but a continuation. Off the heels of her controversial political documentary Patu!, which followed indigenous protests against police violence, director Merata Mita complements her non-fiction work with a dense spiritual tale of community and the cosmic. Eschewing the rip-roaring sensation and sentiment so prominent in white colonial films about the Maori, Mita lingers on continuums of history, especially pre-colonial histories preserved in oral traditions, in tokens of birth, and in the watchful eyes of older and younger generations. Once critiqued for its confounding narrative, MAURI is instead a patchwork story with no single center, a community story made for a community, not the Pakeha mainstream Merata built a career resisting. The result, immortalized in this stunning new restoration, is a work fellow Maori director Barry Barclay has called “the world’s first truly indigenous film.”

–Brian Hu

3.03GB | 1h 39m | 1920×1080 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/A7B7508AD6BDA46/Mauri.1988.1080p.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H.264-thr.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:None

The post Merata Mita – Mauri (1988) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Utu is the Maori word for “Retribution,” which sums up the chief motivating factor of this New Zealand-produced drama. Set in the 1870s, the film details the exigencies of British Colonial rule. A Maori scout, Te Wheke (Anzac Wallace), stumbles across a native village that has been destroyed in a British raid. Since it is the scout’s own village, he deserts the British army, the better to seek “utu.” Leading a vigilante force consisting of his fellow Maoris, Te Wheke kills as many British settlers as he can get his hands on. The feverish conviction of his crusade is in stark contrast to the attitudes of the British, who seem more concerned with material possessions than with human beings. Popular down under star Bruno Lawrence is cast as a vengeance-driven settler who makes it his personal mission in life to end Te Wheke’s reign of terror.

Official Selection: Cannes Film Festival 1983

In a colonial New Zealand torn apart by the Land Wars, a Maori warrior and a colonial settler set out to seek vengeance for the massacre of their families.

Released in 1983, this powerful epic was Geoff Murphy’s third feature – after “Wild Man” and “Goodbye Pork Pie”. Focussed around the dynamic performances of screen veteran Bruno Lawrence and newcomer Anzac Wallace, Utu mines a painful and violent period of New Zealand history with unparalleled energy, humour and compassion.

2.46GB | 1h 47m | 1024×554 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/719102D70DB1011/Utu.Redux.1983.BDRIP.576p.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv
or
https://tezfiles.com/file/8955ffa70e3d3/Utu.Redux.1983.BDRIP.576p.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

Language:Maori,English
Subtitles:English hardcoded for Maori parts only

The post Geoff Murphy – UTU (1983) first appeared on Cinema of the World.