Inheriting Cousins

In 2004 the pioneering filmmaker Merata Mita was on a mission to bring the beloved story of Cousins to the big screen. Over the previous three decades, Mita had directed the landmark documentaries Bastion Point: Day 507 and Patu! and was the first Māri woman to write and direct a feature film — Mauri, released in 1988. She had begun working with author Patricia Grace on a script adapted from Grace’s novel more than a decade earlier, shortly after its publication in 1992. But as the project progressed, she ran into an irritatingly familiar problem.

When Mita took the script to potential funders, one of the first notes she received was that the

Pākehā characters were treated too unsympathetically. There weren’t many Pākehā characters in the film — Grace’s stories about family, conflict, love, and racism always place Māori lives at the centre. But according to producers familiar with decisions made