It’s only been a little over a year since the self-proclaimed Freedom Movement occupied Parliament grounds.
From the 6th of February to the 2nd of March, 2022, while the majority of the country was staying home, getting vaccinated, social distancing and wearing masks to protect themselves and their loved ones from a global pandemic, a loose coalition of people opposed to all of those measures occupied the grounds in front of Parliament House.
To say the occupation was controversial would be an understatement. The protests were a lightning rod for the frustrations of everyone coping with living in the shadow of a global pandemic: whether you thought they were brave, principled freedom fighters pushing back against government overreach, or deluded contrarians putting the health of the community at risk, everyone had an opinion about the self-described Freedom Village.
As the most recent and most vocal political protest movement in Aotearoa, the battle for who gets to write the history of this occupation is an ongoing one. History is contested territory: it is fought over, contextualised and re-contextualised over and over, until one side or another makes their story stick.
River of Freedom is the latest sally in this affray.
Filmmaker Gaylene Barnes has assembled footage from the protests with interviews with the participants in an emotionally laden narrative that presents a case for viewing the protests as a largely peaceful, principled stand against sinister government overreach by people who were left without any other option. Any violence at Freedom Village was instigated by police, or committed by desperate people pushed too far by a government that ignored them, ridiculed them, and smeared them as far-right fascists and white supremacists.
As a piece of propaganda, it is well made.
I use the word ‘propaganda’ advisedly, and in the most neutral sense possible: this is a film that has a clear agenda. It has a message it wants to push, for a political aim. That message is quite clear:
“Remember how angry you were? You need to feel that way again. Rejoin the movement.”
River of Freedom takes the viewer on an emotional journey, framed in the light of the ultimate, violent fate of the protest. It weaves together several key threads that deserve to be untangled, critically evaluated and measured against the facts.
Grievances and Enemies
A lot of run time is devoted to the grievances of the protestors. Much is made of otherwise healthy people who “die suddenly” and inexplicably after receiving just one COVID vaccination. People talk of alienation from their families and loved ones, being barred from taking Catholic communion as their church won’t let unvaccinated people inside, tangi not held and weddings on hold.
The people to blame have names and faces: The audience in my screening erupts into audible hisses and boos whenever Jacinda Ardern, Trevor Mallard, Chris Bishop, Siouxsie Wiles, Andrew Coster and others appear on the screen.
David Seymour goes through a short villain arc: initially railing against the mandates as an unjustified overreach, his appearance at the (admittedly, in hindsight, cringe-worthy) Vaxathon puts him squarely on the side of the oppressors. His later visit to the Backbencher to talk to protestors is omitted.
A consistent theme is the duplicity of the media and the cruelty of a government who won’t acknowledge their demands. If only Parliament would open negotiations with us, the lament goes, this would have been sorted in the first week. Never mind that their demands included arresting politicians and civil servants, putting them through show trials for crimes against humanity, and executing them: this film smooths the rough edges off its revisionist history.
Self-appointed experts talk about the vaccine injured; hundreds of crosses are strung up on a banner, representing unsubstantiated deaths that the misinformed crowd attribute to vaccine side effects. That number is significantly exaggerated: There were four deaths attributed to the COVID-19 vaccine in NZ, and it cheapens their memory to hide the grief of their families in a mass of manufactured outrage.
Kirsten Murfitt presents a partially redacted clinical evaluation of the Pfizer vaccine, the existence of redactions, she claims, are obvious proof of government perfidy. Sanctioned GP Matt Shelton waxes poetic about informed consent. Representatives from fringe groups like NZDSOS parade with posters memorializing the alleged fallen. It is worth keeping in mind that Kirsten Murfitt is now a candidate for NZ First, and Matt Shelton has voiced support for the party.
Freedom Village as a Community
The film details the inner workings of the encampment. We spend time with musicians, yoga instructors, event coordinators, self-employed paramedics, the guys who empty the Portaloos, volunteers cooking meals, and others who see to it that the impromptu village functions on a logistical level.
There’s footage of the community banding together in crisis: when Trevor Mallard conducts his one-man assault on the camp using “Guantanamo Bay tactics” – blasting the camp with Baby Shark and vaccine safety PSA audio over loudspeakers, turning on the lawn sprinklers – the camp rallies, digging shallow moats to guide the water way from tents and bringing in straw to dry the mud.
There’s an emotional reality that can’t be discounted: The protesters are having a genuine, heightened emotional experience. After months of isolation and alienation from friends and family (who find their new politics and beliefs off-putting enough to voluntarily dissociate from them), they’ve found fellow travellers. There is an intensity of feeling as the protesters bond over shared hardships, having nightly dance parties and yoga sessions with their new friends: friends who validate and affirm their worst fears, friends who assure them that what they’re doing is noble and brave and just.
If their fears weren’t unfounded, it would be noble. As it is, the protestors are a captive audience for self-interested profiteers and political agitators.
This is not to say the protestors don’t believe the things they say: they do, sincerely and emphatically. But how they formed these beliefs, what these beliefs were formed on, and who led them to these conclusions warrants examination.
River of Freedom is remarkable just as much for what isn’t shown, as it is for what it depicts. Completely absent from the screen are figures such as Kelvyn Alp, whose Counterspin Media covered the protest extensively using violent rhetoric and whose channel uploaded footage of the Christchurch mosque shootings. Destiny Church and Brian Tamaki do not feature, but their front group, Freedom and Rights Coalition, feature prominently. The incident of a car being driven into a block of police is removed from the narrative. Neo-Nazi figures like Kyle Chapman – stranded in the Picton encampment, but still involved in planning and coordinating events in Wellington through movement Telegram channels – are absent. Anti-vaccine group Voices for Freedom played a substantial role in whipping members into a frenzy, and Action Zealandia, a white supremacist group who claimed the COVID vaccines were a Jewish plot to sterilise and depopulate the world, are scrubbed from the documentary’s world.
Indeed, the idea that there are far-right elements at the protest is depicted by the filmmaker as laughable, an unjust smear the mainstream media and their foes in Wellington perpetuate to persecute them.
Much is made of former MP Michael Wood’s “river of filth” speech which condemned the anti-semitic and fascistic elements within the camp. A clip is played, selectively edited to imply that he is referring to the entire movement rather than provocateurs within it. This is contrasted with footage of Māori protesters peacefully going about their business. It’s absurd, the film language tells us: How could there be fascists in this peaceful, Māori-led, joyous gathering?
Whitewashing Violence and Appropriating Māori Struggle
The imagery of Māori sovereignty is everywhere on screen. Tino Rangatiratanga and Te Kara flags fly upside down to signify distress. Protesters talk of sovereignty constantly, personal sovereignty over their bodies, something they feel has been taken from them by the public health measures.
But, they neglect any consideration for the bodily sovereignty rights of immune-compromised people, or people with long-term conditions and the elderly, who were more vulnerable to COVID complications. Refusing to wear a mask in a supermarket took away their right to a safe environment with less chance of infection.
The protesters’ struggle is explicitly linked to the struggle for recognition of Māori rights under Te Tiriti o Waitangi by the film. One woman relates the experience of the police forcefully removing the protesters and the camp to the burning of a pa by colonial troops. Protesters speak of themselves as mana whenua, of the occupation as reclaiming land.
Like everything in this film, the outside world viewed the events differently. While protestor Tuffy Churton attempted to serve a trespass notice against the entire Government, Wellington iwi leaders, distressed by the lack of respect for their mana whenua, were doing the opposite, and pleading with protestors to leave. Hapu and Iwi promoted vaccination in their communities nationally, to protect the health of their elders.
Māori are not a monolith. There are a range of political positions within the community, and yes, Māori were amongst the protestors. The film, however, tries to claim the mana of the entire Māori sovereignty movement for their cause, something which is audacious to say the least.
The film is also keen to downplay and minimise the violence committed by protestors, while emphasising violence done to the protestors.
Former MP Marama Fox carries a lot of water for this narrative, characterising the frightening calls for Jacinda Ardern, Ashley Bloomfield, and other MPs and civil servants to be hung for crimes against humanity under the Nuremberg convention as simple hyperbole to attract attention. The nooses hung in the trees outside parliament, the sheer unrelenting vitriol in secret Telegram chats and voiced aloud in amateur livestreams from the camp would tell a different story, if they were ever shown on screen.
The police are alternatively depicted as good men doing a hard job, and violent enforcers of an unjust government. Much is made of the successful High Court challenge to remove vaccine mandates for police, and how the protestors feel betrayed that the police return their kindness with impact munitions and tear gas.
It is true that the violence against the occupiers was greeted with enthusiasm by some in the general public. A montage of angry Facebook comments and editorial headlines welcoming the police actions is contrasted with footage of protestors being manhandled, talking about wounds sustained in the skirmish, cracked ribs and eyes washed out with milk to rinse away tear gas. The police announce three of them were injured in just one conflict; the protestors claim over 90 of them were treated for mild to moderate injuries.
Any belligerence by campers is written off as traumatised people acting out. The fires during the final push are acknowledged to have been lit by campers, but sympathy is extended to them. Any violence by protestors is retaliatory: nowhere in the film do we see the car driven into police lines, the school children harassed for wearing masks, the attempts to storm the barricades in the first week of the protest.
The goal, here, is to get the audience on side: to remind them of the righteousness of their cause, the injustices done to them, to rally the faithful for new action.
Community Building and Reinforcement
Since the protest, the freedom movement has been searching for a new cause. In the absence of vaccine mandates, the movement has splintered into rival alternative media empires. Reality Check Radio competes with The Platform and Counterspin for viewers. Targets float through the conspiratorial milieu: one week drag queens are trying to groom children by reading stories to them at libraries, the next, sinister Māori elites are trying to institute tribal rule by stealth, through Iwi consultation on natural resource management.
Activity in these spaces has certainly been galvanised by the election. Efforts by conspiracy believers to infiltrate ACT and New Zealand First have come to light, with people holding anti-vaccine, climate change denial and New World Order style beliefs being selected as candidates to both parties. Even Labour and National have anti-vaccine candidates on their list.
We are now at risk of the fringe becoming mainstream.
River of Freedom arrives at a time of elevated energy but fractured direction in the movement. It offers warm memories of a time when they were united, dancing with their friends in a rainstorm that mysteriously only seemed to be centred over Wellington. It asks the audience to “rebuild the foundations” they once had, to rediscover that sense of belonging and purpose.
The only politician given favourable treatment in the film is Winston Peters, whose trip into the camp to meet and greet people, proudly maskless, is given glowing coverage. We now know that Glenn Inwood, a former tobacco and whaling lobbyist who posts conspiratorial content under the name Resistance Kiwi, has been working with NZ First to recruit conspiratorial candidates such as Kirsten Murfitt. Together with Matt Shelton and Dr Michelle Warren of NZDSOS he has been campaigning amongst the freedom movement community for NZ First, saying that only a bloc vote for NZF will get like-minded MPs in power.
The film doesn’t outright tell the viewer to vote for NZ First: It doesn’t need to. It simply seeks to activate the viewer, to renew the call for freedom in their hearts.
If a lapsed anti-vaxxer watches the film and decides to check in on their old friends in the movement, maybe dive back into the old Telegram groups from back in the day, they will find themselves surrounded by furious debate over whether it is better to back a fringe party with extreme views like Freedoms NZ, Democracy NZ or NZ Loyal, or to back a proven party with a real chance of getting seats in Parliament like NZ First.
The Mirror World
River of Freedom is a dispatch from the mirror world. Author Naomi Klein’s book details the uncanny experience of being mistaken for Naomi Wolf, a feminist essayist who has embraced transphobia and vaccine denialism. Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World is her exploration of the parallel reality of the vaccine skeptic, an ultimately empathetic and humanistic portrayal of lost seekers, beholden to a media and social landscape distorted by propaganda and untruth.
The film is compelling, in the way that looking in a mirror is compelling: it reflects back at you the beliefs and passions of a contentious moment in our nation’s history, and presents a portrait of a maligned subculture.
But it’s a funhouse mirror, the picture is distorted.
The things unsaid and the people not profiled matter just as much as those given a voice. Brad Flutey is thanked in the credits, but not given space in the narrative. He has been charged with numerous crimes, including assaulting a police officer. Kelvyn Alp’s Islamophobic rants and incitement to violence still happened, even if this film doesn’t want you to remember them. Brian Tamaki is still asking his followers to treat all gay, lesbian and transgender individuals as dangerous paedophiles.
The ramifications of those 28 days in 2022 are still being felt in our society and politics even if we would all rather forget them. The River of Freedom runs right next to the ‘river of filth’, even if you can’t see one from the viewpoint of the other.
