A Place To Stand Essay Example

, even though it was softly presented the mana of his mihi, resonates through the soul.

“Tena kautou katoa, Ko Tiare taku ingoa, he hoia I mate au I Te pakanga o Vietnam I mate toku wairangi mate katoa o oku hoa, No reira he kehua noa iho Tena tatou katoa”. ” Greetings to you all, my name is Tiare, I am a soldier, I died in Vietnam War, my spirit died, and so did my friends and so I am a ghost, greetings to us all”. After hearing his mihi, Tiare’s daughter understood her father’s longing to find his turangawaewae.

Tiare’s daughter, she has a deep love for her father, but she doesn’t understand the effects the war has played in life, which has lead him to live the life he now lives, she supports her father after his mihi in the homeless shelter and she come to an understanding he needs to go home, needs to let go of the haunting memories of the past and be at peace with himself. Tiare’s experience is reminisce of my own grandfather, Louis Trego who fought in the Korean War.

Both men having suffered great traumatic stress, lived out the rest of their lives in dire need of a place where they could address there pains and let the past go. As I viewed this film it bought back memories of my grandfather and how he dealt with the pain and suffering of war, on many occasions he would wet the bed, run and hide in the closet as the Iroquois helicopters scream through the air and he would yell and weep until

the sound of the rotors were long gone into the distance, in his final years, even so far from his homeland he found his turangawaewae in the small town of Turangi.

Though the circumstances of Tiare and my Grandfather are different, the parallels are clear. Both men found peace when they were both able to find a Turangawaewae. In Tiare’s case, it was his Marae, and for my grandfather, it was Turangi. Each scene told an emotional story through the camera, sometimes you would see through Tiare’s eyes, from his point of view and his perceptions of the world in post war times.

Where in many of the wide shots that captured his facial expression the sadness, despair and longing to make peace with himself, the camera views during his war experience were quick, very fast until the moment his friends were killed, while on his return at his Marae you could see his pain, the loss of dear friends and Peter Burger captured those emotions, so as a viewer I was consumed by not only Tiare’s pain but also my own loved ones that had suffered dearly because of the dramatic events that war left them.

The Marae is a place where the Living meet the Dead. This is important because Tiare is searching for a place where he can stand, express his thoughts, and gain peace from the dead. Tiare’s daughter is oblivious to this, until Tiare gets up to mihi at the homeless shelter, standing on a tray of glass clods.

She then realises that the solution is to take him home to their marae, where he can

speak to the dead and be heard by them, because he never got the opportunity to do so when he got back home from Vietnam. “Sometimes we do not need to outsource our emotional and spiritual health to the care of outsiders sometime all that is needed is a little introspection and a trip back home”. (Perich,2013)

Though the cast and production crew were not 100% Maori, the fact that the film tells its story from a Tikanga Maori point of view makes the Non-Maori input a co-operative effort as opposed to Non-Maori telling a Maori story from their perspective, the acknowledgement that the Marae is a spiritual healing place for Maori to resolve issues of the past, Tiare who is suffering from his time in the service has trouble fitting in, he keeps his past to himself, majority of people would have him put away in a mental institution, but the help he needs rest within the roots of our ancestors on the Marae, where the living and the dead meet and the past is let go and peace is made . throughout turangawaewae, the story resonates a sense of belonging, hope, love and spiritual freedom from the past and to let go of the effects of war which as dislocated him from the world for many years, to let go of his friends who did return home with him as he seeks to find solace, which Tiare obtained at the end of the film, as he went home to his Marae and found his turangawaewae.