Once Were Warriors

Once Were Warriors, a movie about modern Maori in urban New Zealand, starts brilliantly. We see a shot of a beautiful natural area with some tranquil music in the background. Then the camera pans away and we see that this natural area is simply a photograph on a billboard next to the highway. The shot still lasts and we see Beth Heke coming back from the mall. The movie plays with our expectations. We know we are going to watch a movie about Maori people, so when we see the first shot we are not surprised at all. We are prejudiced to believe that the Maori still live in the wilderness with primitive means. This obviously is not true. This prejudice is often unconscious and when the camera pans out we become conscious of our prejudice. We realize that we found the first shot a very normal first shot to start a movie about Maoris. The rest pf the movie is not as brilliant, but is still very good and often very powerful and shocking

Beth Heke is married to Jake Heke and together they have five children. They live in a relatively nice house even though they struggle to make ends meet. In the first scenes everything seems pretty fine. Beth and Jake obviously love each other and their oldest daughter is reading her own stories to her little brothers. Boogie has some troubles with the police and is expected to court because he stole something. But it seems like everything will be OK. They (and we) don't know that this will be the day that this family will start to disintegrate with tragic consequences.

In another great and important scene we see Jake with his friends in a bar listening to a live performance by a singer. A thug doesn't care about this and puts on the jukebox. As a consequence he is beaten up by Jake, which is quite an achievement. Previously we saw this thug beating up five seemingly strong people very easily. Jake is now celebrated by the rest of the bar and the party continues at the Hekes.

The atmosphere at the Hekes' party is so good, pleasant and full of love that we are often jealous that we aren't there. It's then even more of a shock when it goes horribly wrong. Beth gets a bit annoyed, because her son does not listen to her and she reacts a bit cross when her one of Jake's friends asks for something. This infuriates Jake and he beats her up. Our sympathy for Jake is not completely lost though. We realize that he could have easily inflicted much bigger harm on her and that he actually controlled himself by not killing her. The next morning we learn it's not the first time something like this happened. To make matters worse Boogie has to go to a detention center.

In the rest of the film Beth hopes to make her husband, who she really does love, a better man, while trying to keep her family together. She unfortunately does not succeed and things only get worse.

I won't tell much more about the plot. The film gets only more violent and only more filled with aggression. The violence is often very shocking, because it's filmed very unflinchingly. There are calm scenes, but the tension in them is so great, because we expect that at any moment it can all erupt. And it often does.