Jeremy Leatinu’u’s early practice explored performance through the public choreography of simple actions and movements that engaged with Māori and Pasifika understandings of time, place, language and people. The clarity and simplicity of this early work is evident in Te Whakawhitinga 2022, in which the artist shares a slowly unfolding story of one man through a complex interweaving of history and experience, language and landscape, people and place.

Part-way through Te Whakawhitinga, one of the film’s two narrators, ‘Pāpā’, shares that Rongomātāne (the atua, or god, of peace and agriculture) is on one side, and Tūmatauenga (the atua of war) on the other. Te Whakawhitinga presents Pāpā’s journey between Rongomātāne and Tūmatauenga, recounting his travel as a young man ready to take on the world, through to the time of Te Pakanga Tuarua o te Ao (World War Two) and back to the present day.

Just as Pāpā moves through time, the narration of his journey moves through generations, as it is shared by both the protagonist and his daughter. This fictional story traces the decades of Pāpā’s adult life, together with the path of his ancestors in their travels from their northern homeland to invade the lands of the south. While triggered by the events of World War Two, Pāpā’s journey south to enlist in the army was not – like that of his ancestors – for the conquest of the lands of another iwi (people/tribe), but to capture hearts, as he befriends fellow soldiers from varying iwi, then marries, before returning north with a family.

In many ways, Jeremy Leatinu’u’s Te Whakawhitinga is as much about the land as it is about Pāpā. Images of a slowly unfurling koru (fern frond) and sweeping vistas introduce audiences to the landscape as another character in the narrative, rather than as merely a backdrop.