A reasoned response
A new film about the 2007 Tuhoe terror raids tells a much bigger story, actor tells Tom McKinlay.
There’s whakapapa in Manu Bennett’s role in the new film Muru that goes way beyond the normal considerations of casting.
Sure, he ticks all the boxes for a casting director, bringing a barely contained menace from the first time we see him, hirsute to the point of wearing a permanent Balaclava.
But in the Kiwi actor’s telling, he carried a history going back centuries, spanning Empire and the globe, to the part of Sgt Kimiora, a razorsharp patu in the Special Tactics Group (STG).
The film is a ‘‘response’’ to the raids on Tuhoe in 2007, when armoured, armed and masked police descended on the rural communities of Te Urewera, locking a laser target on men, women and children.
At the time, the West was still in the grip of 911’s febrile aftermath, terrorism lurking around every corner and racial profiling tagging some groups as more likely than others. But even so, the police raids presented as an almost comically desperate attempt to get in on the world’s big story, never mind the collateral damage.
When the dust had settled, all the police had managed was a couple of firearm infringements, for which artist and activist Tame Iti was required to do jail time.
Bennett, best known for his roles in the small screen Spartacus series and big screen Hobbit films, can claim an invitation from Iti himself to be involved in the dramatisation, but starts his story much further back — and further away, in Ireland.
The actor has Te Arawa and Ngati Kahungunu whakapapa, but also English heritage. Bennett is an English name. However, at some point it had made its way to Ireland.
Curious about the history, Manu Bennett and his sister travelled to Ireland to see what they could learn.
‘‘All these wonderful Irish people were, ‘oh, what are you looking for, what’s your family name?’. We said ‘Bennett’, and they said ‘ah, OK, best you go up
Manu Bennett as Sgt Kimiora of the STG, in
to that church on the hill’. And there was a church that was called the Church of Ireland, but it was really the Church of England that had been rebranded,’’ he says.
All of a sudden he was wrestling with the sure knowledge that his family was intimately involved in a process of colonisation — it was there in his whakapapa, in his Anglo whakapapa. A Bennett forebear had crossed the Irish Sea to quash Catholicism and bring the locals to heel.
History was crowding in, but that wasn’t the half of it.
When the actor was working on Spartacus, playing the part of escaped slave, gladiator and rebel Crixus, the Australianraised
Right: Cliff Curtis as Police Sgt ‘‘Taffy’’ Tawharau.
Bennett became aware of Te Kooti.
‘‘I had this feeling that once upon a time in Maori history we had our own Spartacus, this guy called Te Kooti who was imprisoned on the Chatham Islands and just like Spartacus and Crixus, had jumped on a ship, sailed back to the mainland and started rounding up Maori to go and fight the oppression of the Crown.’’
The more he read about Te Kooti the stronger the connections seemed and he commissioned an LA leatherworkertothestars to make him a jacket with Te Kooti’s flag on the back.
‘‘Then I found an article about
my ancestor on my Maori side called Te Pokiha Taranui, paramount chief out at Ngati Pikiao, Maketu.’’
He had sided with the Crown against Te Kooti, pursuing him into Te Urewera in the late 1860s.
‘‘When I found that out, I cancelled my order for the jacket with the Te Kooti flag,’’ he says.
History, it emerged, was evenhanded with its discomfort. Between those two whakapapa, Maori and Pakeha, it was like being caught between two mountains, he says.
But back to that invitation from Iti to be a part of Muru ,the Tearepa Kahidirected, Cliff Curtisled film in which Tuhoe