A genrecrossing feat of storytelling
We Are Still Here (M, 82 mins) Directed by Beck Cole, Dena Curtis, Tracey Rigney, Danielle MacLean, Tim Worrall, Renae Maihi, Miki Magasiva, Mario Gaoa, Richard Curtis and Chantelle Burgoyne Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★1⁄2
One of the most uncommon and enjoyable sentences I ever get to write is: ‘‘I have never seen anything like this before.’’
I thought about that, watching We Are Still Here for the first time at last year’s New Zealand International Film Festival.
We Are Still Here is an anthology movie, made as a coproduction between Indigenous film-makers from Australia and Aotearoa. There are eight films in all, from 10 directors, some working together.
Anthology films are not new. In New Zealand and across the Pacific, Waru and Vai were both mighty achievements that have moved audiences around the world, and The Turning – and others – have represented our cousins in the West Island quite excellently in recent years.
But We Are Still Here is a different, more sprawling, thematically ambitious and subjective film than Waru, Vai or The Turning.
We Are Still Here takes place across a millennium. The subject is loosely – but with laser focus – a response to colonisation. But the responses come in many forms, none of them predictable – or expected. The films skip back and forth across the seas between great nations and refuse to play by the rules of any compendium of short films that has gone before.
These films literally intertwine and bear witness to each other, they watch each other and occasionally crash into each other’s narratives. The effect is maybe the closest to time-travel – or a pure, subjective dreamscape – that any film I know of has ever achieved.
We Are Still Here crosses genres, mediums and generations. As a feat of storytelling and a response to history, it is probably unprecedented. And if you have any interest at all in the ways in which films can be made, even without millions of dollars to burn, then watching We Are Still Here is pretty much compulsory.
Very recommended.
In Arrernte, English, Samoan, Te reo Mā ori and Turkish with English subtitles, We Are Still Here is now screening in select cinemas nationwide.