The Panthers

Making its international premiere as an official selection at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, THE PANTHERS is a music-influenced, social justice drama series from New Zealand. The six, hour-long episodes, based-on-a-true-story series covers a devastating and resonant period in New Zealand’s history through the dramatization of the founding of The Polynesian Panthers – a revolutionary social justice movement directly inspired by the Black Panther movement in the U.S. The 1974-set narrative follows a young man who is the black sheep of his Tongan family who is frustrated by his community being stuck in a broken economic and criminal justice system. In the face of increasingly aggressive racial-profiling from the government and police force, he forms his own revolutionary movement The Polynesian Panthers, while also trying to juggle his conservative parents’ expectations, and romance with a street queen.