Testimony
2022 · 10m · New Zealand
Directed by Alice Lolohea
Genres: biography, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, provocative
Forty-five years after his parents’ wrongful arrests, a Tongan New Zealander speaks out about the Dawn Raids’ legacy of shame.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A straight testimony film about historical injustice—fine, necessary even—but Lolohea isn't subverting the form or making us question what documentary can do. It's doing exactly what we expect it to do, which means it's not a Felix pick.
Lolohea positions this testimony within the lineage of postcolonial documentary and oral history, letting 45 years of silence carry its own formal weight through restraint and deliberate pacing—the kind of film that understands its ethical obligations to both subject and form.
The singular choice here is the decision to let the speaker's presence and voice do the work without visual spectacle—that restraint, that trust in testimony itself as the image, is what transforms a personal reckoning into something that resonates beyond the immediate.