New Zealand’s farming community and grassroots rugby are the focus of this cultural slice-of-life documentary following a rural rugby team looking to overcome a string of bitter losses. Shot in black and white from the filmmakers behind How Far is Heaven.
"Rugby and farming are so heavily branded as symbols of national identity that you might wonder what relationship the images bear to real rugby-playing farmers in 2015. Confessed ‘rugby outsiders’, husband and wife filmmakers Chris Pryor and Miriam Smith hunkered down in Reporoa for the better part of a year to find out. Their dispatch from the grassroots is unsentimental, funny, and so startlingly beautiful it could reanimate your responses to an overplayed mythology.
"The pair follow the area’s predominantly pakeha rugby team at work and at play as they struggle for credibility after a string of humiliating losses. The camera takes to several willing specimens of dairy-farming manhood who open up for our entertainment and edification." (New Zealand International Film Festival)
Gorgeously shot in black and white, the New Zealand depicted in The Ground We Won is not that conjured up by urbanites making butter commercials or high frame rate fantasy epics. Populated by Kiwis rather than Kiwiana, the documentary is set to enthral audiences both here and abroad as it follows the members of the Reporoa rugby team on and off the paddock, from before sunup until arguably much too long after sundown.
Full reviewThis is so much more than just rugby... Compulsory viewing for everyone.
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A strikingly beautiful paean to the sometimes brutal business of being a male.
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The only excuse you will ever need to watch a Kiwi documentary on the big screen.
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