directed and written by James Napier Robertson. 99 minutes.
Intense, involving, often uneasy – probably not what you’d expect of a film based around a chess club. But its coach and mentor, the wonderfully named Genesis Potini, a Maori chess champion who died in 2011, was an unconventional, generous, troubled soul, who was diagnosed in youth as bipolar. Cliff Curtis, who you may recognize from Whale Rider and Once Were Warriors, brilliantly portrays his charged, precarious mental state, so that a conventional ‘street kids come good’ story is anything but predictable.
