REMEMBER “Once Were Warriors” (1994)? Or “Boy” (2010)? When Kiwi filmmakers get their creative teeth into a tough topic, the result can be, often is, a shattering experience for filmgoers.

Chess as a spectator sport ? You’d better believe it.

James Napier Robertson’s film begins with Genesis Potini walking aimlessly in the rain. Seeing a chessboard and pieces in a curio shop, he wanders in to satisfy his curiosity. And rapidly turns the pieces into a quick-fire game that might make us wonder about the intellectual handicaps burdening a man fresh out of a mental institution, needing daily medication. We may wonder but need not worry. Gentle giant Genesis is a whizz at shakh-mat (in Persian, “the king is dead”), in modern English checkmate, “you lose the game”.

Beside chess, the film’s other structural member is Genesis’ surviving of savage treatment from the bikie gang led by his brother whose son Mana (James Rolleston, admired for the title role in Robertson’s “Boy”) is approaching a birthday at which time tribal custom requires him to undergo a set of rituals.

Genesis gets the kids at the local school interested in chess. There’s a tournament in Auckland in six weeks. Preparation of the kids from scratch mingles with the conflict between the brothers about which should have guidance rights over Mana.

A scruffy group of Maori kids arrives to compete against middle-class white players. The outcome of that is not predictable. Indeed, nor is anything else in the film. Robertson’s staging of it delivers a collection of tensions more than equalling those in films dealing with other, more physical, sports.

Genesis died in 2011. Maori actor Cliff Curtis plays him in a tour de force portrayal. The school chess club that he helped create still meets. Robertson’s film will immortalise him far beyond that.

At Palace Electric and Capitol 6