My tears over Taika’s Oscar win
the stage as film-maker and director, Renae Maihi (Nga¯ puhi, Te Arawa), fought against Bob Jones’ claims of defamation; as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police launched raids to forcibly and violently remove Wet’suwet’en land defenders; as the public outcry for RNZ Concert drowns out the urgency of funding Iwi Radio; as wai Ma¯ ori ownership is contested amidst a severe drought. The list is inexhaustible. Our joy, as indigenous storytellers, is always in a knot of pain and struggle.
It doesn’t matter how many times I return to watch Boy, Hunt For The Wilderpeople or Two Cars, One Night .I know what is coming but I can never anticipate how much I will cry; how much I will laugh. What may seem subtle or nondescript to some feels very intentional to Ma¯ ori audiences.
What we have in Taika’s work is something better than a boring dichotomy of good/bad, urban/rural or plastic/authentic. His work confuses whatever arbitrary borders others had placed around representations of Ma¯ ori – on and off screen – and allow us to imagine our realities as necessarily fragmented and imperfectly sewn together; emancipatory without being pretentious. More than anything, they are familiar – they feel very close to how we would like to see ourselves.
As Dan Taipua (Waikato-Tainui) has said of Taika’s approach to Thor: Ragnarok, ‘‘it’s not uniquely Ma¯ ori but it is distinctly Ma¯ ori in tone, in rhythm and as a kind of philosophical outlook.’’
This transcends Taika’s body of work. It isn’t singular or exclusive but at the same time, it isn’t something that can be replicated.
Storytelling is in our blood. The way we tell stories is coded by our experiences; the humour and sadness are uniquely our own. Taika didn’t need acknowledgement from the academy; from the ‘‘locals’’ as Bong Joon-Ho called them.
But no-one could tell Jojo Rabbit in the way that Taika did. Standing on that stage – acknowledging the tangata whenua of Tataviam, Chumash and Tongva – Taika the storyteller wrote a new chapter for us all.