Time: 112 Minutes
Age Rating: PG
Director: Merata Mita

Patu! was a film I watched as part of my local film society, the main thing I knew about it was that it was a documentary about the New Zealand protests during the Springbok tour in the 1980s. It was really good and definitely well worth watching.

As said above, Patu! is about people coming together to try to prevent the 1981 tour of New Zealand by the Springboks, and when the tour goes ahead anyway, they then try to disrupt it. This documentary mostly focuses on the protest movement, and it is compelling to watch people coming together to protest against apartheid. It is especially confronting in the second half when we see police become more aggressive, confrontational and violent, and it’s very sobering and shocking to watch real life footage of police attacking protestors. Patu! is very much a documentation of what happened. There’s very minimal voiceovers and there’s only a few instances of people being interviewed. It’s just flat out capturing what happened so it’s just about impossible for anyone to convincingly label it as “propaganda”.

Merata Mita’s direction is strong, especially when considering what it would’ve taken to capture these events. The cameras are right there in the center of the action, even uncomfortably close during the scenes of police’s brutality against protestors. One criticism I do have is that often the sound quality isn’t the best, and sometimes it could be hard to hear things that were being said.

Patu! is an important, powerful and raw document of protest and activism, capturing a vital moment in New Zealand history. I highly recommend checking it out.