NZIFF: We Were Dangerous

Winning the Special Jury Prize at SXSW this year, Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu’s electric debut launches our festival with a fiery trio of delinquent schoolgirls railing against the colonial system in 1950s New Zealand.

New Zealand in the 1950s was not an especially friendly place for outcasts, especially for those who also happened to be young, queer, or Māori women. When teenage Nellie (Erana James, Hot Mother, NZIFF 2021) and Daisy (Manaia Hall in her debut film role) are rounded up on the city streets, they are sent to the School for Incorrigible and Delinquent Girls under the care of a devout matron (Rima Te Wiata, Housebound, NZIFF 2014). There, they meet Lou, a wealthy Pākehā girl whose parents sent her to the school to curtail her wayward behaviour at home. Reminiscent of conversion therapy camps or Magdalene laundries for “fallen” women, the institution is designed to reform these juvenile rebels into obedient young ladies primed for marriage.

After a failed escape attempt, the girls and their cohort of renegades are shipped off to the rugged, isolated former leper colony Ōtamahua (Quail Island). We follow the rebellious trio through etiquette classes and lessons in the virtues of British colonisation, but doom sets in when they catch a glimpse of the dead-of-night discipline being performed against those who act up. With nothing left to lose, the girls begin plotting their escape.

This vivid debut from Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu (Ngāpuhi, Te Rarawa) is a riotous middle finger to colonial tyranny, a fierce feminist anthem with a wicked sense of humour, and a potent portrait of friendship and solidarity. Co-written by filmmaker and New Yorker cartoonist Maddie Dai and executive-produced by Taika Waititi, We Were Dangerous is a vibrant ode to adolescent anarchy and chosen family from a cast and crew of thrilling new Aotearoa filmmaking talent.

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