Fascinated by rugby and its colossal significance within the hearts and minds of New Zealanders, filmmakers Christopher Pryor and Miriam Smith had the basis for a new documentary – the follow-up to How Far Is Heaven, released in 2012. But where would they shoot it? Who would they follow? And what story were they going to tell? The humble north-island town of Reporoa would ultimately fill in the blanks, a brilliant film the end result.
The Ground We Won revolves around an endearing community of farmers turned scrappy rugby union underdogs striving for a breakout season. The documentary follows their efforts to orchestrate a resurgence in spirit and, in turn, reignite community-wide support for the club. The film also explores team’s extreme sense of mateship. Every day is apparently Mad Monday and laddish antics are the norm, right down to post-game beers and, occasionally, beer bongs. Seriously.
By all accounts, Christopher Pryor and Miriam Smith were fish-out-of-water filmmakers in approaching the community of Reporoa for this access-all-areas exploration – self-confessed outsiders, in fact. Whatever they expected to find in Reporoa, though, they ultimately managed to extract an incredibly rich film. Having sifted through some two hundred hours of footage, piecing things together over the course of a year, Pryor and Smith present a kind of multi-faceted cultural study. The Ground We Won explores masculinity and sports camaraderie at a grassroots level, the minutiae of life in rural New Zealand and, of course, the country’s intense national-identity-level passion for rugby union. That’s fairly substantial for a 90-minute film. There’s a subtlety in everything it says, too, feeling strangely untouched, editorially speaking – an apparent rarity for documentaries.
Even if you strip away all of the above, The Ground We Won is still an extremely entertaining film on a very basic level, thanks in no small part to Reporoa’s outstanding characters. There’s the veritable chief big boy Kelvin, a moralistic family man with a mind for raising his kids on the game he adores. The Ground We Won has plenty of heart and, notably, much of that is owed to Kelvin. Meanwhile, the film follows Peanut, a seventeen year old 2IC dairy farmer with an eagerness to meet the world head on, from booze to boxing. Whoever or whatever the film’s focus, though, there’s an irrepressible sense of humor throughout. The Ground We Won will have you beaming on more than one occasion.
Overall, The Ground We Won is not only a unique sports-comedy-documentary hybrid, it’s perfectly engrossing until the credits roll. Highly recommended.
BY NICK MASON
