As his debut film Once Were Warriors showed, Lee Tamahori was a director of guts and flair

Tamahori was the outstanding director of Along Came a Spider and Die Another Day – but his first film was his greatest work In 1994, the New Zealand film-maker Lee Tamahori made one of the biggest debuts of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with his gut-wrenching social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a working-class Maori family in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison is the boozing, brawling, bragging alpha-male welfare claimant Jake, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and assault his wife Beth, played by Rena Owen, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his two elder sons who have drifted into gangland culture and crime, as well as his sensitive daughter Grace, who has talent as a writer. One son gets gang tattoos; the other is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least tutored in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns dignity and s...

Tomorrow’s Freedom review – does this man know the way to peace in Israel and Palestine?

Sombre documentary focuses on the former Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti, and how he is becoming a Mandela-like figure since his imprisonment in 2002

Here is a film that offers something not generally on offer in the media: an envisioning of the future and a road map, or part of a road map, out of the present situation in Israel and Palestine. It’s about Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti, an initial supporter of the 1993 and 1995 Oslo peace accords who became progressively disillusioned with the slow choreography of international consensus, and was ultimately imprisoned in 2002 for authorising deadly attacks on Israel. Barghouti’s position is not that he is innocent, but that an Israeli court has no right to try him.

During the long years since, he has gone on hunger strike, been beaten and abused in captivity; his grownup children have themselves been targeted and arrested and his wife Fadwa has been repeatedly refused permission to visit him. But the film shows that something else has been happening as well: the Mandela-isation of Barghouti, a process which the Israeli forces themselves may well come to see as convenient, when in some future time they need an internationally accepted figure with whom to negotiate.

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