We Were Dangerous

Our first moments within New Zealand’s School for Incorrigible and Delinquent Girls are met with pious austerity. Yet creeping in on the fringes is a rumbling rebelliousness in the form of giggling girlhood. This can be said about We Were Dangerous on the whole. Skirting along the prim and proper edges of Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival’s opening night screening of the SXSW Special Jury Award for Filmmaking winner is delightful subversion and daring disobedience as three girls fight for power over their own bodies.

The year is 1954, and a failed escape plan has landed Nellie (Erana James), Daisy (Manaia Hall), and their cohort on the rugged, isolated former leper colony of Ōtamahua / Quail Island. Their matron (Rima Te Wiata) is devoted to reforming these juvenile rebels into obedient young ladies primed for marriage. Louisa, a wealthy Pākehā girl whose parents sent her away to curtail errant behaviour, joins the motley crew. Fuelled by the natural isolation, the three grow ever closer, taking action into their own hands when they become the subjects of a eugenics experiment. What ensues is a combustible firecracker of a story about class, colonisation, sexuality, race, and standing up for what’s right.

Executive producers Taika Waititi and Piki Films’ irreverent and unmistakable ability to make levity out of dark subjects permeates the film. The heartfelt and genuine tone, however, is entirely the fruit of writer Maddie Dai, director Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu, and producer Morgan Waru’s labours, who together craft a narrative so sincere and honest it’s impossible to not fall in love with it. Cinematographer María Inés Manchego captures the island’s raw, stark, and powerful beauty with an intensity that matches the girls’ fiery spirits.

The choice to assign the film’s narration to the matron provides humour, contrast, and irony, but it also made me yearn for her character’s redemption. I ached for her jealousy to melt into tenderness and lead the girls into battle. I have to agree with Deadline’s Damon Wise: at the end, I found my thoughts with her rather than the girls – they have their whole lives ahead of them he says, she only has her past.

A fierce – albeit short – story of strength in the face of hardship, We Were Dangerous is perfectly summed up in Nellie’s own words: “Ahakoa, he iti he pounamu. Although it is small it is precious.”