DAWN RAID
****
Director: Oscar Kightley
Screenplay: Matthew Metcalfe and Tim Woodhouse
Principal cast:
Andy Murnane
Danny ‘Brotha D’ Leaoasavai’i
Savage
Mareko
Aaradhna
Adeaze
Country: New Zealand
Classification: M
Runtime: 98 mins.
Australian release date: 21 January 2021.
One of the great things about the documentary medium is its ability to inform you about people, places and events about which you previously knew nothing - and entertain you while doing it. This reviewer had never heard of Dawn Raid Entertainment prior to watching the fascinating factual account of its rise and fall and rise again in Dawn Raid. Now, thanks to Oscar Kightley’s documentary, one wonders why one didn’t know more about it.
Andy Murnane and Danny Leaoasavai’i, aka ‘Brotha D’, met when they were studying at business school, hungry for a way out of the poverty that was inherent in Papatoetoe, South Auckland. Nearly 20 kilometres from the Auckland CBD, the suburb was largely inhabited by Polynesian families and featured high unemployment, at least it did in the late ‘90s and early 2000s when Andy and Brotha D started climbing the ladder of success. They began their joint enterprise printing and selling T-shirts at the nearby Ōtara markets, a business that became popular with the local youth because the guys focussed on slogans and designs that played up to Pacific Islander stereotypes. Soon, they’d raised enough capital to open their own shop and, not long after, establish a recording studio in the premises next door. Andy had a head for business and Brotha D was the perfect A&R man and, in 2000, their first CD, Southside Story, a compilation of rap, hip-hop and RnB music was released. When their stable of local artists had grown big enough and they had awards and hits under their belt, the pair took Dawn Raid Entertainment across the Pacific in 2008, intending to conquer the US music industry. It was to be their undoing and when they returned to Auckland, the Internal Revenue Department was after them for unpaid taxes. As Andy explains in Dawn Raid, “We didn’t really know what we were doing. We dropped out of business school before completing the course!”
Samoan-born Oscar Kightley is a well-known actor and comedian in New Zealand (Australian audiences would recognise him from movies like Hunt For The Wilderpeople and The Breaker Upperers) but this is his debut as a documentary director and he’s done a terrific job. Mind you, it’s a story that’s got it all, success and failure, honesty and betrayal, great music and, at its heart, two immensely likable characters. Andy and Brotha D tell it like it is, warts and all, both self-deprecating while acknowledging that they achieved great things before their empire collapsed. One of their motivations was their mutual desire to promote Polynesian culture and employment and many of the Dawn Raid Entertainment artists interviewed here express their surprise that they were able to hit the heights they did. Almost to a man (and they mainly are men; only one female artist, Aaradhna, is interviewed), they state that without Andy and Brotha D, none of it would have happened.
Kightley has made clever use of comic-style animation to illustrate certain plot-points where there’s no archival footage and his editor, Tim Woodhouse (who’s also credited as one of the two writers), has done a very good job of his assemblage. He starts near the end of the story, NYC in 2008, before going back to the beginning and taking us through the guys’ saga chronologically. Don’t dismiss Dawn Raid because you’re not into hip-hop and rap - this is a classic tale about the ups-and-downs of human endeavour and enterprise. The music is just the icing on the cake.
Screenplay: Matthew Metcalfe and Tim Woodhouse
Principal cast:
Andy Murnane
Danny ‘Brotha D’ Leaoasavai’i
Savage
Mareko
Aaradhna
Adeaze
Country: New Zealand
Classification: M
Runtime: 98 mins.
Australian release date: 21 January 2021.
One of the great things about the documentary medium is its ability to inform you about people, places and events about which you previously knew nothing - and entertain you while doing it. This reviewer had never heard of Dawn Raid Entertainment prior to watching the fascinating factual account of its rise and fall and rise again in Dawn Raid. Now, thanks to Oscar Kightley’s documentary, one wonders why one didn’t know more about it.
Andy Murnane and Danny Leaoasavai’i, aka ‘Brotha D’, met when they were studying at business school, hungry for a way out of the poverty that was inherent in Papatoetoe, South Auckland. Nearly 20 kilometres from the Auckland CBD, the suburb was largely inhabited by Polynesian families and featured high unemployment, at least it did in the late ‘90s and early 2000s when Andy and Brotha D started climbing the ladder of success. They began their joint enterprise printing and selling T-shirts at the nearby Ōtara markets, a business that became popular with the local youth because the guys focussed on slogans and designs that played up to Pacific Islander stereotypes. Soon, they’d raised enough capital to open their own shop and, not long after, establish a recording studio in the premises next door. Andy had a head for business and Brotha D was the perfect A&R man and, in 2000, their first CD, Southside Story, a compilation of rap, hip-hop and RnB music was released. When their stable of local artists had grown big enough and they had awards and hits under their belt, the pair took Dawn Raid Entertainment across the Pacific in 2008, intending to conquer the US music industry. It was to be their undoing and when they returned to Auckland, the Internal Revenue Department was after them for unpaid taxes. As Andy explains in Dawn Raid, “We didn’t really know what we were doing. We dropped out of business school before completing the course!”
Samoan-born Oscar Kightley is a well-known actor and comedian in New Zealand (Australian audiences would recognise him from movies like Hunt For The Wilderpeople and The Breaker Upperers) but this is his debut as a documentary director and he’s done a terrific job. Mind you, it’s a story that’s got it all, success and failure, honesty and betrayal, great music and, at its heart, two immensely likable characters. Andy and Brotha D tell it like it is, warts and all, both self-deprecating while acknowledging that they achieved great things before their empire collapsed. One of their motivations was their mutual desire to promote Polynesian culture and employment and many of the Dawn Raid Entertainment artists interviewed here express their surprise that they were able to hit the heights they did. Almost to a man (and they mainly are men; only one female artist, Aaradhna, is interviewed), they state that without Andy and Brotha D, none of it would have happened.
Kightley has made clever use of comic-style animation to illustrate certain plot-points where there’s no archival footage and his editor, Tim Woodhouse (who’s also credited as one of the two writers), has done a very good job of his assemblage. He starts near the end of the story, NYC in 2008, before going back to the beginning and taking us through the guys’ saga chronologically. Don’t dismiss Dawn Raid because you’re not into hip-hop and rap - this is a classic tale about the ups-and-downs of human endeavour and enterprise. The music is just the icing on the cake.