BBFF2024 Official Selection: We Were Dangerous

We Were Dangerous, directed by Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu, tells the story of three teenage girls, who are among a group of “waifs, strays, vagrants, whores and sexual delinquents”, most of them Maori, transported to a reformatory facility on a remote island in 1950s New Zealand. Nellie and Daisy are joined by well-to-do Lou and life on the island takes shape under the command of a devout Matron. But Matron’s faith in her “institutional safety net” becomes tyrannous and horrific as the authorities subject some of the girls to surgery in the dead of night.