News Summary

• Taratoa Stappard’s stunning feature film debut, “Mārama,” is a gothic revenge nightmare rooted in the colonization and cultural theft inflicted upon the Māori people of Aotearoa/New Zealand in the mid-19th century.
• Set inside an especially appalling corner of Victorian England, where indigenous corpses were once treated like demented keepsakes for white explorers.
• The film is rhythmically confident without being too casual about its most graphic horrors.