Humbling record of a life superbly lived

WHEN unionist, advocate, campaigner and all-round good sort Helen Kelly died in 2016, we lost one of the great ones.

Wellington director Tony Sutorius’ film Helen Kelly: Together (now streaming on DocPlay) picks up Kelly’s life in what would be her last nine months. Without preamble, narration or much in the way of introduction, we are dropped into the life, with Kelly still fighting on all fronts.

There is Kelly’s ongoing campaign for a better training and safety regime in the New Zealand forestry service, a burgeoning campaign for better working condition on farms – a meeting with farming industry mouth-pieces on improving safety on quad bikes quickly turns into a sorry mess of PR platitudes – and Kelly’s advocacy on behalf of the Pike River families.

These scenes, as often as not at memorial services and protests, provide the filmmakers with some of their most indelible images. A recording of a miner’s last moments – a phone call – as the first explosion hit the mine, is something I will never forget having heard.

Then there is the fight against the cancer, paired with Kelly’s new-found championing of the freedom to use medical marijuana.

Kelly knew early the tumours would win, but wanted to stay alive every day she had to keep up her work on behalf of everybody who would come after her. A refrain of the film is Kelly’s belief that her work – and the joy she took from it – is what is holding back the inevitable.

What will stay with you from Helen Kelly: Together isn’t the details, the victories, or the battles yet to win. It will be the sheer quality of Kelly’s spirit. The absolutely boundless faith she had that her fellow human beings were always worth the effort and that what is good, honest and true will always eventually prevail, as long as we don’t sit on our hands and allow any other outcome to take root.

Helen Kelly could talk to – and take on – anyone. She was a fearless friend and advocate for the people who needed her and a thorn in the side of the hypocrites she went up against.

Sutorius and his team have made a fascinating, illuminating and often humbling record of a life being superbly lived. Very recommended.

Also dropping on DocPlay in the last few weeks, Ans Westra: Private Journeys/Public Signposts is director Luit Bieringa’s 2006 portrait of New Zealand’s greatest-living photographer.

Bieringa does a lot more here than just walk us through the defining moments of Westra’s life. There is a curator’s sensibility about Bieringa’s direction, with actual ideas being aired, not just ‘‘the facts’’. Recommended.