Indigenous science fiction film Night Raiders, a Canada-New Zealand co-production, is out in cinemas this week. Charlotte Muru-Lanning talks to the film’s wāhine Māori producers Chelsea Winstanley and Ainsley Gardiner about the film, and telling indigenous stories.

Jojo Rabbit; Waru; Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen; The Pā Boys; Two Cars, One Night; Cousins; Boy. Both together and apart, Chelsea Winstanley (Ngāti Ranginui and Ngāi Te Rangi) and Ainsley Gardiner (Te Whānau-ā-Apanui, Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Awa) have worked as writers, producers and directors on some of Aotearoa’s most celebrated films of the last two decades.

Their latest project, Night Raiders, is a dystopian science fiction drama written and directed by Cree-Métis filmmaker Danis Goulet. Winstanley and Gardiner were producers on the film, a Canada-New Zealand co-production.

Set in 2043, Night Raiders tells the story of an Indigenous mother who joins an underground band of Cree vigilantes to try to rescue her daughter from a state-run institution. At the same time futuristic and historical, it’s a confronting analogy for Canada’s treatment of its Indigenous peoples, particularly through the residential school system and the Sixties Scoop – painful legacies not too far removed from our own colonial experience in Aotearoa. While explicitly indigenous – referencing history, politics and tradition – Night Raiders also cleverly embraces sci fi in its purest form.

To make an indigenous film in a genre that is explicitly future-oriented is a statement in and of itself. Colonisation was an explicit attempt to erase the futures of indigenous peoples the world over – whether that be by stealing land, repressing language, assimilation, culture or genocide in the most literal sense. It’s only through constant resistance, and renaissance, that we’ve survived and reclaimed our futures. Telling our stories through the screen is a key part of this. 

“We’re all geared towards telling our own stories,” says Gardiner. “So whether stories are inherently indigenous or not, they already are because they’re stories that we’re compelled to tell”.

But telling our own stories, in our own image, can be an uphill battle.

The film industry as a whole, which Winstanley describes as “still pretty hierarchical, pretty patriarchal, still based on a US Hollywood system”, is a large part of the problem. It’s a system derived overseas, where cultural assumptions and commercial incentives are often at odds with the ambitions of indigenous filmmakers. Gardiner and Winstanley agree that there’s still a stifling lack of diversity in decision-making positions within the film industry. While the pair are constantly trying to innovate from inside the system, they necessarily rely on the resources that others hold. 

In 1985, filmmaker Merata Mita spoke of her unease with the institutions of New Zealand’s film industry in a “Manifesto” presented at the Auckland City Art Gallery, a “plea for diversity in our film industry”. She described the local film industry as forsaking “the reality of a cultural richness in our nation” for “a commercial market overseas littered with bank notes”.

That was 37 years ago, and while there has been progress since then, it’s far from enough. When it comes to the distribution and the exhibiting of films, for example, there remains an assumption that indigenous films don’t have an audience and are less commercially viable. This means they are often turned down by distributors or, if they are picked up, relegated to an 11am screening on a Monday. “That’s kind of BS,” says Gardiner.

Those distributors and exhibitors are like “very bad parents,” she says, “instead of giving us delicious things to try, they just give us McDonalds”.

Still, things have improved drastically for indigenous filmmakers over the past few decades. Gardiner’s experience with Briar Grace-Smith in adapting Patricia Grace’s book Cousins is a telling example. “You couldn’t have made that film 20 or 30 years ago,” says Gardiner.

She’s speaking literally: In the 1990s Merata Mita, working alongside Grace, faced numerous obstacles trying to bring Cousins to the screen. Funders simply didn’t believe a film focusing on three Māori women would appeal to audiences, and the project was ultimately dropped. By the time Gardiner and Smith picked it up nearly 30 years later, attitudes had begun to change. 

That change is apparent in Night Raiders, too. Its majority indigenous cast, including both Indigenous Canadian and Māori actors, is still unusual on cinema screens – especially in science fiction – but you’ll likely not even notice while you’re absorbed in the story. “You don’t see it, because it’s actually reflecting your world back to you,” says Gardiner. For non-indigenous audiences too, “it’s not that hard to present an alternative world to a person and have them accept it and appreciate it”. 

Winstanley and Gardiner say there was enormous goodwill towards the film from both the Canadian and New Zealand funding bodies, based on wanting to support a project made by indigenous women. “That gave us a level of financial commitment above and beyond what we may have expected if we were just being judged purely on its commercial potential,” says Gardiner. Even then, Gardiner says, the commercial potential for Indigenous film shouldn’t be understated.

Productions like Night Raiders provide new opportunities for pan-indigenous cooperation, both commercially and culturally. In the case of Night Raiders, while Cree and Māori share similar experiences of colonisation, there are innumerable cultural and historical differences. Still, “internationally, indigenous communities don’t need to try too hard to understand each other, because we get each other’s storytelling,” Winstanley says. Often, she explains, international indigenous groups are more aligned in their processes than with the mainstream filmmaking bodies in their own countries.

Change doesn’t just happen, it’s made, and Winstanley and Gardiner see their work as intervening in not only the system of film production, but the social system more generally. 

Just like parallel structures in education, governance, health, law and beyond, indigenous filmmaking offers an opportunity to disrupt entrenched hierarchies from within. “We get to use the thing that we’re passionate about to to challenge structures in the area that we can, because you topple one, and they all like dominoes start to fall,” says Gardiner.  

“It’s not like we don’t already have all of the information about why the structures don’t work, how colonisation has impacted on us, how those that colonised us tried to destroy our stories, and taken our stories to then sell them back to us as watered down versions, there’s no more illusion and ignorance for us,” she says.

“The tide is changing,” says Winstanley. “It’s changing slowly, but it’s changing”. 

Largely, they’re driven by the desire to continue the work of those who came before, particularly the trailblazing Mita, who was instrumental in forging the global community of Indigenous filmmakers that made collaborations like Night Raiders possible. Like Mita, they’re both mothers and their children are an ever-present reminder of having an investment in a better future. 

With all of this on their side, the pair think change is certain. “There’s nowhere else for these organisations to hide or these individuals to hide,” says Gardiner, of those who’ve held the purse strings since the cinema industry was in its infancy. Like Standing Rock or Ihumātao, it’s just a matter of numbers. “It’s just enough of us getting together, saying we’re not going to do it this way any more”. 

Night Raiders is in cinemas from tomorrow.