Uproar

This 2023 New Zealand film, co-directed by Paul Middleditch and Hamish Bennett, is set amid the protests that erupted when the South African Springboks rugby team toured the country in 1981. Josh Waaka, seventeen and the only Māori student at a rugby-obsessed Catholic school in Dunedin, is forced off the fence he has sat on all his life; he joins a drama club and drifts into a group of anti-tour protesters. For Josh, played by Julian Dennison, the question is less political than one of identity: which side counts him as its own. The history is structural rather than decorative. Because of apartheid, Māori players had been excluded from All Blacks tours of South Africa, and the tour forced New Zealand to confront its own racism. Minnie Driver plays the mother, and James Rolleston, as the older brother, carries the film's quietest and heaviest line. Who it's for: viewers who like New Zealand cinema, stories about Māori identity, and real social ruptures told in the register of a coming-of-age film. Who it's not for: those wanting political analysis of the protests, or who will find teenage comedy and a history lesson uneasy company in one film.