home All News open_in_new Full Article

As his debut film Once Were Warriors showed, Lee Tamahori was a director of guts and flair

Tamahori was the outstanding director of Along Came a Spider and Die Another Day – but his first film was his greatest workIn 1994, the New Zealand film-maker Lee Tamahori made one of the biggest debuts of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with his gut-wrenching social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a working-class Maori family in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison is the boozing, brawling, bragging alpha-male welfare claimant Jake, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and assault his wife Beth, played by Rena Owen, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his two elder sons who have drifted into gangland culture and crime, as well as his sensitive daughter Grace, who has talent as a writer. One son gets gang tattoos; the other is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least tutored in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns dignity and ...


today 4 w. ago attach_file Events

attach_file Events
attach_file Politics
attach_file Politics
attach_file Politics
attach_file Events
attach_file Politics
attach_file Politics
attach_file Events
attach_file Politics
attach_file Culture
attach_file Events
attach_file Events
attach_file Events
attach_file Events


ID: 2195115539
Add Watch Country

arrow_drop_down