Since I first saw Mārama its memories have lingered

Mārama, the debut feature from Taratoa Stappard, opens in cinemas across Aotearoa today. It is a bold and chilling Māori gothic horror that interrogates and commits revenge upon the Māoriland era of our history, when Māori culture and our people were collected and traded as romantic curios from a far-flung island nation.

Set in 1859, Mary Stevens (Ariana Osborne) arrives in North Yorkshire at Hawkser Manor, an oppressive grand country house owned by Sir Nathaniel Cole (Toby Stephens) and his granddaughter Anne (Evelyn Towersey).

From the moment Mary crosses its threshold, she is assaulted by visions of violence. So when Sir Nathaniel greets her in te reo Māori, the gesture lands not as connection, but as possession.

In that moment, Mārama reveals its core interrogation: proximity as strategy, language as leverage, admiration as camouflage for violence.

These are men who have learned te reo Māori not out of solidarity, but as access to wāhine Māori. The threat is not explosive; it is methodical.

I first saw Mārama at its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, 2025. Despite understanding the historical terrain the film would traverse, I was unprepared for how deeply disturbed I would feel watching it, particularly in that foreign setting. The responses of the audience echoing a colonial gaze that felt like it was trying to grab me through the screen.

Though historic in setting, the film’s aesthetic is sophisticated and unmistakably modern, collapsing past and present so that the horror feels immediate.

Hawkser Manor is a colonial hell-hole, stylised, shadowed grand architecture framing all manner of taonga and toi Māori, with its own whare whakairo positioned as a jewel in the garden.

The whare is unmistakably reminiscent of Hinemihi o te Ao Tawhito, the meeting house removed from Te Wairoa and relocated to England in the nineteenth century.

It is hoped a decision will soon be made to return Hinemihi to Aotearoa after more than 127 years in Surrey. But Hinemihi is just one example among many taonga iwi continue to fight to repatriate. A more gruesome relic of this era is the trade in toi moko (mokomokai), which intensified in the nineteenth century.

These physical objects are made all the more grotesque by Cole and his peers’ obsession not only with Māori artefacts, but with Māori people themselves.

In confronting Cole, and his companion Jack Fenton, Osborne anchors the film with fierce intensity. Surrounded by threats to her whakapapa, past and future, Mary sharpens her awareness.

What begins as survival becomes reclamation.

In the film’s climactic turn, she transforms a story of violence against wāhine Māori into one of restoration and bloody justice.

Stappard has described the film as forging a new genre: Māori gothic horror.

That confidence emerges from his own whakapapa, from stories of wāhine toa, including his great-grandmother Rangiriri Strew, who defiantly wore moko kauae at a time when Māori identity was shamed.

Her international tours performing for colonial audiences form a haunting echo within the film’s Victorian English setting.

There is a deeper inversion at work. The colonial 'Māoriland' era once packaged Māori culture as tradeable spectacle. In both this film and the contemporary Māoriland Film Festival, itself a reclamation of that term, that gaze is turned back.

Where Māori identity was curated as curiosity, Mārama centres a young Māori woman as hero and architect of justice, defining our place in the global cinematic landscape on our own terms.

Māoriland Film Festival is itself, part of the film’s story. In 2019, Stappard won a pitch prize which was used to write Taumanu, a short set within the world of Mārama. We’re proud to have Mārama as our closing night film for MFF2026. Because Mārama bears rewatching.

In the days and weeks since I first saw the film last September, its memories have lingered. Its images return to mind and trigger a succession of trains of thought. It’s a film you want to talk about. It disturbs not to shock, but to reckon. And in doing so, it expands Māori cinema not as spectacle, but as authority.

Madeleine Hakaraia de Young is the director of the Māoriland Film Festival