Miriama McDowell
A school teacher is forced to confront a brutal act from his past when a pair of ruthless drifters takes him and his family on a nightmare road-trip.
Find me a Māori Bride follows the comic misadventures of Tama Bradley, and his cousin George Alpert, a pair of successful, metrosexual Māori men, whose lives are turned upside down, when presented with a wero (challenge), by their late grandmother – find a Māori wife within 6 months, or lose out on inheriting the whānau farm, worth a whopping $47,000,000.
Eight Māori female directors have each contributed a sequence to this powerful and challenging feature which unfolds around the tangi of a small boy who died at the hands of his caregiver.
It is the 1960s. Two Maori families, the Mahanas and the Poatas, make a living shearing sheep on the east coast of New Zealand. The two clans, who are bitter enemies, face each other as rivals at the annual sheep shearing competitions. Simeon is a 14-year-old scion of the Mahana clan. A courageous schoolboy, he rebels against his authoritarian grandfather Tamihana and his traditional ways of thinking and begins to unravel the reasons for the long-standing feud between the two families. Before long, the hierarchies and established structures of the community are in disarray because Tamihana, who is as stubborn as he is proud, is not prepared to acquiesce and pursue new paths.
One-time Maori speed-chess champ, Genesis Potini, lives with a bi-polar disorder and must overcome prejudice and violence in the battle to save his struggling chess club, his family and ultimately, himself.