‘We Were Dangerous’ Team on How New Zealand’s Early 20th Century Eugenics Movement Inspired Sterilization Plot in Taika Waititi-Produced SXSW Film
By Jennifer Maas,
Variety
| 03. 22. 2024
“We Were Dangerous” is a surprisingly funny film for a movie whose central conflict is the sterilization of a group of young women on the fringes of society in 1950s New Zealand.
Knowing the project, which debuted at SXSW in Austin March 8, is executive-produced by from Taika Waititi and Carthew Neal’s Piki Films certainly informs how the film approaches its troubling topic — much like the production company’s Holocaust-set “Jojo Rabbit” — with such levity, the majority of the credit for the heartfelt tone goes to a trio of women: writer Maddie Dai, director Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu and producer Morgan Waru.
“We Were Dangerous” stars Erana James, Nathalie Morris and Manaia Hall as the three girls being held in a delinquent program by a matron (played by Rima Te Wiata). And though the film revolves around female solidarity, the seed that sparked “We Were Dangerous,” which marks the directorial debut for Stewart-Te Whiu and the first screenplay written by Dai, was actually a story about Dai’s great great grandfather, who was imprisoned on an island in New...
Related Articles
By Dan Barry and Sonia A. Rao, The New York Times | 01.26.2026
Photo by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States
of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Late last month, a woman posted a photograph on social media of a purple hat she had knitted, while a black-and-white dog...
By Arthur Lazarus, MedPage Today | 01.23.2026
A growing body of contemporary research and reporting exposes how old ideas can find new life when repurposed within modern systems of medicine, technology, and public policy. Over the last decade, several trends have converged:
- The rise of polygenic scoring...
Group of Tuskegee Experiment test subjects
Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
Every generation needs to learn about what is commonly known as the Tuskegee syphilis study, which ran from 1932 to 1972. (Officially, it was the U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee, Alabama, which gets the emphasis right.) For many people, the history is hard to believe, though it is hardly unique. Of the 600 subjects, all Black men, 399 had syphilis, for which...
By Evelina Johansson Wilén, Jacobin | 01.18.2026
In her book The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson describes pregnancy as an experience marked by a peculiar duality. On the one hand, it is deeply transformative, bodily alien, sometimes almost incomprehensible to the person undergoing it. On the other hand...
.jpg){kind=link}