Boy

(Taika Waititi, New Zealand 2010, DCP, 87 min.)

Boy is an 11-year-old Maori youth growing up with his cousins and his grandmother on Waihau Bay in northern New Zealand in 1984. Boy’s fantasy life is filled with two men: Michael Jackson and Boy’s father, Alamein Sr. Michael Jackson can do no wrong and influences the way Boy wants to dress and dance. The absent Alamein, in Boy’s imagination, is everything from a master carver to a deep-sea treasure hunter and Green Beret. When Alamein is freed from prison and shows up at the house, Boy is overjoyed that he and his little brother, Rocky, will be able to follow their father on his adventures. But they must deal with the disappointment that Alamein’s main purpose in returning home is to look for a stash he deposited on the property before he was arrested, and whether or not he even wants to take them with him.