Cousins

Having lived in NZ from 1960 I realised I knew very little of Maori and what they had to cope with.

The movie made me sad, mad and confronted!

Entwines the very different lives of three Maori girls, cousins, through tumultuous decades, after one of them is taken from her family and raised in an orphanage.

A very moving and cinematic adaptation of Patricia Grace's novel, very effectively condensed into movie length while maintaining the scope and complexity of the multiple threads. The lives of these three women, though particular and intimate, effectively represents a larger story of a culture interrupted by colonialism but regaining its strength and groundedness. The interaction between the personal and the cultural, memory and the moment, are woven together with various events, spanning decades, creating a complex portrait revealing how the past, the present and the future interact with each other, how members of a family interact through space and time, in life and in death. Though the performances were sometimes uneven, the editing and Terence Malick-like cinematography very skillfully conveyed a specific yet expansive spiritual and cultural journey through the entire lives of three compelling and tangible characters.

A film with a lot of heart (and a lot of plot holes).

Worth seeing.

Perhaps it needed a bit more time / budget.

This is a hard film to watch at times, but I felt in showing stories that happened and are still happening to Indigenous people and communities, it was to help deniers and minimizers to wake-up to the truth, and encourage those working for positive change and better intercultural respect and cooperation to continue despite the racism and sexism persisting in society due to historical amnesia, Eurocentric education, and apathy.

Apologies and acknowledgement of colonial and contemporary crimes against Indigenous people are not enough without honesty and true structural, educational and inter-community changes. For Indigenous peoples like the Maori, the effects of genocide and ethnocide that began in colonial times continues today. The effects are within both the individuals and their communities: trauma of all kinds, loss of identity, cultures, land, Self. Yet another horrible fact is the cycle of abuse and trauma against them exacerbated crimes within Indigenous communities, against each other, with children especially affected.

Mostly especially, from the past to present, the treatment of Indigenous girls and women was/is especially horrific, yet minimized and often silenced. This film both subtly and directly shows the psychological, spiritual and physical torment inflicted by peoples of European descent in their Eurocentric efforts to purify "Others", particularly through "Christianity", the beliefs and edicts of which were rewritten to serve the desires of European men to retain unchallenged power and invent supposed superiority. And remember, they first betrayed, tortured and killed their own non-Christian peers, particularly women, before invading and inflicting terror worldwide. It's all an ugly cycle that needs ending, so healing can begin for all.

Honestly the most beautiful film I've seen in years. At the end I'd say over a third of the cinema was crying. What a powerful story!