Cousins

Honestly the most beautiful film I've seen in years. At the end I'd say over a third of the cinema was crying. What a powerful story!

Having lived in NZ from 1960 I realised I knew very little of Maori and what they had to cope with.

The movie made me sad, mad and confronted!

Entwines the very different lives of three Maori girls, cousins, through tumultuous decades, after one of them is taken from her family and raised in an orphanage.

A very moving and cinematic adaptation of Patricia Grace's novel, very effectively condensed into movie length while maintaining the scope and complexity of the multiple threads. The lives of these three women, though particular and intimate, effectively represents a larger story of a culture interrupted by colonialism but regaining its strength and groundedness. The interaction between the personal and the cultural, memory and the moment, are woven together with various events, spanning decades, creating a complex portrait revealing how the past, the present and the future interact with each other, how members of a family interact through space and time, in life and in death. Though the performances were sometimes uneven, the editing and Terence Malick-like cinematography very skillfully conveyed a specific yet expansive spiritual and cultural journey through the entire lives of three compelling and tangible characters.

This really captured my interest because it is a story of the experiences of our Maori people but I find it rather fragmented and does not go into the details of what happened to these women. It would have been better as a series describing more and connecting the timelines.

As it is. It is very poignant but not deep enough. It was just scratching the surface and does not explain so many things and leaves me with so many questions. Like why did Mata become homeless when she had a job?

Their life stories are poorly explained and more like raptured memoirs in a dream like state and does not capture the essences of their hurt loss of connection. The cousins alienation from one another and their separation from their land. Maybe a more personal narrative focused more on the total lifestory of one of the girls. It was just too short.

A film with a lot of heart (and a lot of plot holes).

Worth seeing.

Perhaps it needed a bit more time / budget.