by Daniel Pecoraro, Staff Writer

Returning to the Athena Film Festival is at once familiar and strange. The buildings for the screenings are all the same, the walk from the subway identical, but the trip in and out of Barnard resembles a fortress or a demilitarized zone. Across the street at Columbia, the campus that once flung its gates open is now hermetically sealed. Thursday evening saw a massive police presence along Broadway for a protest on campus, and Friday night an array of cameras for news reports after a nine-figure theft of grants. And amid all this, two solid to very good films.

Satisfied
Directed by Chris Bolan and Melissa Haizlip
Starring Renée Elise Goldsberry, Alexis Johnson, Benjamin Johnson, and Brielle Johnson
Unrated
Runtime: 1 hour and 24 minutes
Seeking distribution

Satisfied is for more than just the Hamilton heads. Of which I must admit, am one, and not because it’s part of my day job; as a lover of American history and musical theater, raised on 1776 and Les Mis, Hamilton was kind of made for me. Yes, it does capture the show’s original Angelica Schuyler, Renée Elise Goldsberry, as she prepares for the role that defines her career to this point, even beyond starring in the musical adaptation of The Color Purple and being the last Mimi in Rent on Broadway. And, yes, even beyond making the phrase “and the brown and the beige and the brooooown” permanently lodged in my head as part of Original Cast Album: Co-Op. It is also a special treat to see Hamilton in workshops, in tech at the Public downtown, and making the transfer to the Richard Rodgers Theater through archival footage and Goldsberry’s private video diaries. (The doc was borne out of Goldsberry unearthing these recordings following Hamilton’s Disney+ release amid deep Covid.)

But just as an actor is more than their roles, Satisfied is more than just a success story on Broadway. It’s a story of choices and sacrifices made, and balancing one’s art with being the only mother in the company of a cultural juggernaut. And co-directors Chris Bolan and Melissa Haizlip, and editor M. Watanabe Milmore, deftly strike a balance between Goldsberry’s family and professional life. The three — especially Milmore, given the work that went into combing through all the iPhone videos with retrospective interviews and performance footage — have crafted a thorough portrait of Goldsberry’s path to playing Angelica and to raising her children Benjamin and Brielle alongside her husband Alexis.

One shot that sticks in my head exemplifies this juggling act. It’s from a street view outside the Public Theater, looking up at the second-floor windows, where we see Goldsberry on FaceTime (or maybe just recording a video for her kids later). This quiet, solitary moment, where every second counts and is not taken for granted, shows us who Goldsberry is and what Satisfied is, I think, trying to show: the myth of “having it all” is just that, a story belying the easily apparent cracks in pursuit of career and family. Sure, there are some gratuitous moments in the film; the TV news footage touting the success of the musical could have been dropped, and Satisfied did not need to reproduce the Broadway recording of “Satisfied” nearly in full. Yet I genuinely think that, at its core, Satisfied was made not with the intent of being self-aggrandizing or self-indulgent, but in service of exemplifying a universal theme.

We Were Dangerous
Directed by Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu
Written by Maddie Dai and Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu
Starring Erana James, Rima Te Wiata, Manaia Hall, and Aaron Jackson
Unrated in the US; rated M in New Zealand
Runtime: 1 hour and 23 minutes
In select US theaters April 4, and now streaming in Australia and New Zealand

It seems like every instance of colonization includes a re-education or conversion regime. Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, Dutch, or American and Canadian (by way of and independently from the aforementioned in various combinations) — no matter what, there’s a whole lot of “kill the [insert Indigenous people here] to save the wo/man.” Such is the case in New Zealand, where hundreds of assimilationist schools continued to teach Maori students into the 1960s.

We Were Dangerous sets the story near the end of that Christianizing, “civilizing” education policy, in the time after World War II when Elizabeth II was still young, at the Te Motu School for Incorrigible and Delinquent Girls. Led by a Matron (Rima Te Wiata) who, at an early age, abandoned her Maori heritage for the sisterhood, the school’s main troublemakers are Nellie (Erana James), Daisy (Manaia Hall), and Peggy (Isayah Snow), who we first see trying to escape the gates with Peggy’s boyfriend on the outside (whom, we later learn, impregnated Peggy). Peggy makes it, Nellie and Daisy don’t, and to prevent further such flights the school is moved to a remote island formerly used as a medical asylum. There Nellie and Daisy — who first met after Nellie headed from her home on a quickly thwarted search for work in the city, and before she and Daisy were arrested for theft — meet the new girl, Lou (Nathalie Morris). Lou has been sent to Te Motu at the request of her father, a doctor and marina owner, on account of Lou’s budding lesbianism. Despite the clear differences from the duo in Island Hut 3 — white and wealthy instead of Maori, poor, abandoned, and in Daisy’s case, illiterate — Lou, Daisy, and Nellie form a strong bond as chosen kin. Together they hatch a plan to escape the island, and to set fire to a medical cabin used for sterilization surgeries.

It’s commendable that writer-director Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu has been able to make a film telling this story with a clear-eyed historical critique, with heavy emotional stakes (i.e. the involuntary sterilization, seemingly without anesthetics, in a dang wooden shed), heightened by Cam Ballantyne’s score. And Stewart-Te Whiu left room for some humor from the land that brought us Flight of the Conchords and What We Do in the Shadows, particularly coming from Stephen Tamarapa as Barry, the island’s caretaker. There’s a particularly great scene involving rat poison and peanut butter where Tamarapa and Hall’s comedic chops especially shine. I didn’t quite care for the heavy use of voiceover from the Matron (save for her own flashback), and elements of the main trio’s scheme included some gratuitous repetition in addition to clever re-framing. Though I suppose at 82 minutes, it couldn’t get much tighter. Ultimately James, Hall, and Morris gamely play the heroic rebels, and Te Wiata does well to avoid falling entirely in the Trunchbull-Hannigan school of matron tropes by portraying the zeal of a convert, though I think more could have been made of her upbringing. Overall, We Were Dangerous is well worth a watch once it hits American theaters, on the heels of its theatrical and streaming run on Australian and Kiwi shores.

Find all the latest Athena film fest dispatches from MovieJawn’s Daniel Pecoraro here.

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