Friday, March 13 / 9:15 pm / Ottawa Art Gallery
Program: Klee, Mārama
Feature presentation \
Mārama
2025 / 89 minutes / New Zealand
Director: Taratoa Stappard
Writer: Taratoa Stappard
Language: English, Maori
Subtitles: English
MĀRAMA
Taratoa Shappard New Zealand 2025, 89 minutes
Set in dramatic landscapes of the North Yorkshire moors in 1859, Taratoa Stappard’s stylish debut feature is an examination of the shadowy consequences of the British Empire’s global reach. When Mary Stevens, a young Māori teacher from Aotearoa-New Zealand, arrives after a long journey in search of family truths, she discovers that the British man who wrote to her and said he has much to tell about her family is already dead. A long way from home, Mary accepts a paying position as governess at the brooding Hawkser Manor. She is hired to tutor the niece of the seemingly benevolent Nathanial Cole, a wealthy man who made his fortune whaling in the South Seas near Mary’s homeland. She soon discovers that Cole has stocked his palatial home with plundered sacred Māori artifacts and seems to know a lot more about Mary than she first understood. When she starts to have The Shining-like visions and hears ancestral Māori voices, Mary becomes her Māori self – Mārama – and fights not only for her family history but also for her very life and culture. Much like the late, great Canadian Indigenous filmmaker Jeff Barnaby, Māori director Stappard boldly redeploys familiar horror film tropes to imaginatively and ferociously address the terrors of colonialism.
Tom McSorley
Press
“With striking visual precision and a searing critique of colonial and cultural fetishisation, Stappard conjures a taut gothic atmosphere thick with foreboding. In doing so, he lays claim to a bold new cinematic territory: Māori Gothic, where the thin veneer of Victorian civility is torn away to reveal something truly monstrous beneath. Not ghosts or ghouls, but the legacy of empire itself.” Jason Ryle, Toronto International Film Festival
AWARDS
Sea Devil Award (Best Fantastic Feature Film) at the Imagine Filmfestival Amsterdam
Best Score (Independent Film - Foreign Language) at the Hollywood Music In Media Awards
Short film \
Klee
2025 / 20 minutes / Saskatchewan
Director: Gavin Baird
Language: English
Content Notes: Nudity, sexual content
Reminiscent of early Cronenberg, Gavin Baird’s Klee merges body horror, period piece, sci-fi, and colonial revenge as a shape-shifting alien (seth cardinal dodginghorse) is sent to Earth in the form of an Indigenous man to invade, seduce, and terminate a group of colonizers in 1885 Saskatchewan.
Shot on 16mm and featuring a brilliant score by respectfulchild (who also did the score for IFFO 2023 selection Scaring Women at Night), Klee’s dreamy low-fi, analog aesthetics make for a fascinating contrast to Mārama’s brooding Gothic influences. While both films use genre – specifically horror – to explore Indigenous experiences of colonialism, their approaches are vastly different, and equally powerful.
Devin Hartley