Mirumiru draws a new picture of dementia through a te ao Māori lens

A period of loss and grieving has inspired a profoundly moving new film about mate wareware (dementia) and the enduring bonds of a loving Māori pair.

Mirumiru brings kaumātua to life on the big screen in a form not often used to represent Māori. With no dialogue, the animation relies on visuals and music to tell its deeply emotional story.

Writer and director Allan George (Ngāti Kahungunu) told Culture 101’s Perlina Lau that the film, produced alongside Auckland-based Mukpuddy Animation Studio, was inspired by the death of his stepdad a few years ago, and his mum's recent decline with dementia.

Watch the trailer for Mirumiru here

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"A few years earlier I had lost my stepdad, we were really close and that hit my mum really hard and that put her into a sort of sedentary lifestyle where dementia took hold.

"Seeing her decline, her personality changed, she had memory loss, difficulty performing any task, like getting to the mailbox and back was something she just couldn't do.

"I guess my strategy of getting through it was sitting down and writing a story about it."

The film follows kaumātua Shorty and his ailing wife Lena, whose memories are escaping her mind in the form of bubbles.

"She has dementia, and whenever she looks at a photo or she gets triggered with a memory by looking at her wedding ring, a bubble will literally spin around and form in her head and take off," George explains.

"[Shorty's] trying to control those memories but he's holding onto the past a little too much and needs to focus on the present. That's the theme of the film."

The journey to create Mirumiru has taken years, and George says recent personal events have allowed him to see the film in a new light.

"The last few years have been really difficult ... we only just had my mum's unveiling right before we finished the film, so we went back down to Wairoa and I looked at it with a new lens.

"I felt like some weight had lifted off me, and my family down there were like, 'When's your movie coming out? I wanna see it'. And I know for a fact they're all gonna cry ... they were crying when they were asking me."

The filmmakers also created The Little Book of Mirumiru, a lookbook that explores the world of the film, scene by scene.

The part show-bible, part-scrapbook helped guide the animation team and included family photos, personal mementoes, and detailed breakdowns of scenes.

George says the book also brought his whānau into the process.

"My family really fed into this and my daughter was born at the time as well. My mum never got to meet her moko unfortunately, but my daughter's gonna get to see this film with kaumātua in it which I've never seen before.

"The film is inherently nostalgic and pulls on literally props, chairs, photos, items, books ... things that are scattered throughout the film have come in from my family group chat, they're just putting things in there like, 'Can you use this? and I'm like, 'Yeah, done'."

George says the film's animation really honours te ao Māori in its attention to detail. The team took two research trips to Wairoa, where they carefully broke down every scene, drawing inspiration from George's childhood home.

"My marae is actually in this film. We took a photo at the front and the Mukpuddy background artist made it look identical, it's actually crazy.

"In one photo, there's a hat on a hook, in Ngāti Kahungunu the photos are on the left and righthand side, and at the back was a tissue box someone had left there. That tissue box is in our film, and that hat is in our film.

"I won't spoil it but there's a lot of details for people who know te ao Māori. Why that tree is put in a certain place ... we really got to dive into it. It's a Kahungunu film, it's Wairoa hard."

Mirumiru will be showcased at a community screening during the Māoriland Film Festival on Friday 28 March.