Cousins

I tried to find you, Mata. We all did.

– Makareta (Briar Grace-Smith) encounters her lost cousin Mata (Tanea Heke) in Wellington

What I enjoyed most of all was having the opportunity to be on-set during production where there was a joyful whānau atmosphere, and where the only raised voice was when it was time to 'cut'.

– Cousins author Patricia Grace on the making of the film, in a 21 January 2021 press release

Merata [Mita] was my mentor. She had a significant influence in my journey with film, so to be able to pick up Cousins where she left it and continue her legacy, is an honour.

– Co-director and producer Ainsley Gardiner on taking over Cousins after the death of original director Merata Mita, The Rotorua Daily Post, 20 May 2019

Patricia Grace writes with an enviable clarity and power. The three stories have complicated emotional and imaginative resonances. They invoke the familiar confusions of family life and the pleasures and humiliations encountered in an alien world outside the family, yet move naturally into a mysticism which has none of the disrupting bravura of the 'special effect'.

– Margaret Mahy reviews Patricia Grace's original novel, The Evening Post, 31 July 1992, page 7

...an understated, yet emotion-filled tale of love and loss, of identity and the institutions that try to deny and reshape it and of the power of whānau, all magnificently played out by a fabulous ensemble of homegrown actors of all ages ... Cousins is a timely and vital look at the importance of identity, family and institutional inequalities, some of which shamefully still exist today.

– Stuff critic James Croot in a four and a half star review, 4 March 2021

Cousins treats our people and our tikanga with a tenderness rarely seen on our screens. Māori women are front and centre, portrayed as complex and multi-layered leaders, each in their own specific way. Māori male characters, rather than being depicted as violent or angry as they so often have been, are instead loving husbands, kind caretakers and gentle kaumātua.

– Spinoff writer Charlotte Muru-Lanning in a rave review of the film, 8 March 2021

Shot mostly in close-up with a sensuous, lyrical grace by DP [director of photography] Raymond Edwards, the film is never more gorgeous than when on location in Rotorua, where the Pairama clan lives. Moving deftly between eras, the cutting by Angela Boyd creates a rhythm of circling and repetition that serves the story well.

– Co-director, writer and actor Briar Grace-Smith on the movie, in a 21 January 2021 press release

We'll come to get you, Mata, to bring you back. This is your home.

– Mata's sisters (Keyahne Patrick Williams and Mihi Te Rauhi Daniels), early in the extract

From now on there's to be no more contact with the Māori family. I am her legal guardian.

– Mrs Parkinson (Sylvia Rands) on taking over care for Mata, in the excerpt

Three cousins, their paths woven across time. Their lives separate, their lives converge, they separate again, this is how it must be...

– The narrator (Ngawhakawairangi Hohepa), in the first few minutes of Cousins

Shot mostly in close-up with a sensuous, lyrical grace by DP [director of photography] Raymond Edwards, the film is never more gorgeous than when on location in Rotorua, where the Pairama clan lives. Moving deftly between eras, the cutting by Angela Boyd creates a rhythm of circling and repetition that serves the story well.

– Variety critic Alissa Simon in a review of the film, 3 August 2021

It was one of the most beautiful film scripts I’d ever read. It was tragic that Merata’s film was never made, but for us it just forms part of the whakapapa of the film — not the content of it, but the spirit of it.

– Co-director Ainsley Gardiner on the original Cousins script, by Patricia Grace and Merata Mita, The Spinoff, 8 March 2021