Ten Questions with Director Whetu Fala
The women history forgot – and the theatre they built anyway
There is a particular kind of disappearance that happens in the arts.
Not the dramatic kind. Not scandal, not collapse. Something quieter. More polite. The kind where names slip out of programmes, where influence dissolves into anecdote, where entire lives are reduced to a passing line: they were helpful… they were around… they baked…
And yet-somehow-the institutions remain.
Taki Rua: Breaking Barriers, now available on Rialto Rentals, begins with this absence. And then, with remarkable restraint, it begins to correct it.
Introducing Whetu Fala
Director Whetu Fala does not approach this story as a historian, nor as an outsider looking in. His connection is lived, generational, and deeply personal. What emerges is not simply a record of a theatre company, but a reclamation-of memory, of influence, of people who shaped the cultural backbone of Aotearoa without ever being properly written into it.
At the centre of his film is a deceptively simple idea:
“He aha te mea nui o te ao, he tangata, he tangata.”
What is the most important thing in the world? It is people.
From that premise, everything unfolds.
A story that refused to stay hidden
What Fala uncovers is not a neat narrative, but something far more unsettling: a group of Māori and Pākehā women whose influence was everywhere-and yet, somehow, nowhere in the official record.
They were organisers, educators, cultural translators, advocates. They marched for women’s rights. For homosexual law reform. They trained artists in tikanga Māori. They shaped funding pathways. They influenced institutions that now define the arts landscape of Aotearoa.
And still, history remembered them as peripheral.
“It was as if their worlds had never met… yet all around us were the places they had influenced.”
This is where the film shifts-quietly, but decisively-from documentation to restoration.
Biculturalism – before it was comfortable
Today, biculturalism in Aotearoa often feels embedded, even ordinary. Te Reo Māori is heard across media, politics, and public life. It is expected.
But inevitability is a fiction history tells itself after the fact.
What the film reveals-quietly, persistently-is that biculturalism was once improbable. Contested. Dismissed. It required not only belief, but action. It required people willing to share power before there was any guarantee that power would be returned.
“Bi-culturalism… has morphed into ‘te ao’ – our way of being.”
What began as negotiation has become something lived.
Wāhine at the centre – not the margins
One of the film’s quiet corrections is also its most powerful: the repositioning of wāhine.
Not as supporters. Not as background. But as force.
“Without the voices and work of the women… there would have been no theatre of Taki Rua.”
It is a reminder, as old as the whakataukī itself:
“He wahine, he whenua e ora ai te tangata.”
Without women, humanity cannot survive.
The cost of holding ground
There is no romanticism here about longevity.
Thirty years of cultural resistance does not resolve cleanly. It wears down. It demands survival-through financial strain, creative tension, and a cultural landscape not always ready to receive what Taki Rua was building.
That the theatre still exists is, in itself, a kind of astonishment.
“That Taki Rua Theatre was still in existence… was the most surprising cost.”
Even now, the work continues.
And yet, this is not a story that lives only in the past.
It moves.
Across the motu, in rehearsal rooms and community halls, a younger ensemble carries it forward-touring, performing, speaking Te Reo Māori not as revival, but as living language. What was once fought for now exists in motion: breath, voice, presence. The stage is no longer just a site of resistance, but of continuation. Not inherited as certainty, but practiced-night after night, audience by audience-until the story becomes something shared again.
Art. Politics. Or something inseparable
To separate art from politics in this story would be to misunderstand it entirely.
Taki Rua created space-real, paid, professional space-for Māori creatives to write, direct, perform, and lead.
That act alone was both artistic and political.
“The result of the political actions… was the flowering of artistic careers.”
An inheritance without instructions
For the next generation, the legacy of Taki Rua arrives without a clear conclusion.
Victory? Perhaps.
Challenge? Equally.
“Kei a koutou te tikanga.”
It is for you to decide.
When the land begins to speak
As the film moves across the motu, something else emerges: the presence of whenua as more than setting.
From Ngāi Tūāhuriri to Ngāti Whātua, from Te Whanganui-a-Tara to Te Araroa, the story gathers texture, memory, and meaning. Aotearoa is not backdrop here. It is participant.
Resisting the tidy ending
There is a temptation, in stories like this, to resolve everything. To shape the past into something coherent. Even triumphant.
Fala resists that.
The film acknowledges loss. Untimely deaths. Tensions. Gaps. Forgetting.
“Hardly triumphant.”
And yet-it endures.
What silence reveals
Some of the most powerful moments in Breaking Barriers are not spoken.
They arrive in pauses. In held expressions. In the space between memory and emotion.
“When they fall silent – it is like an emergency alert to their souls.”
What this film leaves behind
If this film is not a conclusion, it is a marker.
A record of what was done here, in Aotearoa, at a time when the ideas it was built on were considered improbable, even outlandish.
Ordinary people chose partnership. Chose to share power. Chose to begin.
They did not wait for permission.
“Whatungarongaro te tangata, toitū te whenua.”
People pass on, but the land remains.
Roger Wyllie, View Mag
Taki Rua: Breaking Barriers is available now on Rialto Rentals.