‘Dangerous’ teens fight

When you lock a bunch of girls away on an island, they’re bound to start acting up. But how far will they go to reclaim their autonomy? A new film offers one possibility. Sapeer Mayron reports.

For Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu, the impact of institutional abuse runs across generations. Her dad was just a baby when his 26-year-old mother was arrested and put in prison for assaulting an older man. Deemed “unfit” to be a parent, her child was taken away and condemned to a childhood moving between boys’ homes and foster homes.

So, when the chance came up to direct a film about the girls who survive an abusive “care” institution, Stewart-Te Whiu jumped at the opportunity of handling a script which “spoke to me, very much so”.

We Were Dangerous will open the New Zealand International Film Festival this month, making its local debut after winning awards overseas.

Set on a fictional island but filmed on the very real island of Ōtamahua in the rohe of Te Hapū o Ngāti Wheke, whose representative Kerepeti Paraone joined as an associate producer, viewers get a rare insight into how quickly “care” turned sour, often driven by a supposedly Christian “civilisation” ethos.

Stewart Te-Whiu has no qualms about lambasting this religious practice. Organised religion, she says, has done more harm than good.

Taken to a remote island and installed in a school for “delinquent girls”, subjected to the preaching and abuse of their strict matron (Rima Te Wiata – The Breaker Upperers, Hunt for the Wilderpeople), the fictional teen girls of We Were Dangerous have been told there is no hope for them in 1950s Aotearoa.

While the island, the school, the characters and what happens to them are all fictional, their stories are grounded in a troubling reality.

Take this example, which features in the film: in 1903, a booklet by MP Dr William Chapple began circulating. Titled “Fertility of the Unfit”, Chapple’s writing promoted eugenics as a solution to New Zealand’s falling Pākehā birth rate of the time.

“Society is breeding from defective