New Zealand Women Tell Moving ‘Stories’ of War

In her prize-winning documentary “War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us,” New Zealand filmmaker Gaylene Preston takes a simple idea and turns it into a rich, universal experience.

She has gathered seven elderly women, seated them one at a time in front of a black dropcloth, and asked them about the impact of World War II on their lives, while interspersing archival footage and stills.

There are many levels and meanings to what skilled off-screen interviewer Judith Fyfe draws from these pleasant, grandmotherly women. Right away Preston and Fyfe remind us of how easy it is for it not to occur to us that ordinary-looking people could ever have had extraordinary experiences. Yet these women are full of alternately warm, romantic, harrowing and tragic tales.

Preston’s film inevitably provides a fresh perspective on the World War II era. The United States and New Zealand were--and are--so much alike in many ways. Both countries sent their young men to distant locales, both have puritanical traditions, but New Zealand, which had a population of only 1.5 million when war broke out, is so much smaller, so much more remote and even now so much more conservative. What we hadn’t expected to learn is how strong and deep anti-American feelings ran among New Zealanders at the onset of war, and Preston, in addressing her own people primarily, never tells us why.

Two of the women are Maori, and one of them became an honorary U.S. Marine for her service as a kind of mother figure for an American military camp, where her informal duties extended far beyond washing and ironing uniforms. By and large this woman, Jean, has good things to say about Americans, but she does report putting a racist in his place.

The other Maori woman, Mabel, tells of taking over her family’s school bus and trucking business while her husband served in the Maori Battalion, which suffered great losses.

Throughout, Preston’s researchers went to considerable effort to provide specific contexts for their interviewees’ recollections, and the newsreels of the returning Maori soldiers and all the traditional ceremonies involved are especially memorable.

Preston’s women all have such striking, often painful revelations that they shouldn’t be given away here. (One woman, for example, tells of her own devastating front-line experiences in Egypt and Italy.)

Inevitably, they involve losses but also various forms of discrimination and, at times, an oppressive conformity.

Ironically, in this light, one woman, who is in fact Preston’s own mother, tells of an unhappy wartime marriage she had a special reason for not forsaking and what it cost her to make work.

There are lots of things we don’t learn about these women we’ve come to care about. Are those whose husbands survived the war still alive? What about their children and grandchildren? But that’s not what “War Stories” is about, and Preston has made a succinct, captivating 95-minute movie that perhaps wisely leaves us wanting more.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: The film has adult themes, including a description of an attempted rape.

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‘War Stories’

Featuring Pamela Quill, Flo Small, Tui Preston, Jean Andrews, Rita Graham, Neva Clarke McKenna, Mabel Waititi.

A First Run Features presentation, produced in association with the New Zealand Film Commission, New Zealand on Air and TV 3. Producer-director Gaylene Preston. Executive producer Robin Laing. Cinematographer Alun Bollinger. Film editor Paul Sutorius. Music Jonathan Besser. Oral archive project manager/interviewer Judith Fyfe. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

* Exclusively at the Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869.