A police sergeant caught between his uniform and his own community anchors this New Zealand drama, set on a single tense day when an armed government raid reaches a rural town.
What is Muru about?
Muru is inspired by real events and follows Sergeant Taffy Tawharau, a local police officer in the Ruatoki community, on the day an armed government raid arrives at his doorstep. As the operation unfolds around a school and the surrounding neighborhood, Taffy is pulled between his duty to the force he serves and his loyalty to the people he has policed and lived among for years. The film builds its tension from that split allegiance rather than from a conventional case-and-chase structure, tracking how the community reacts as the raid moves through the town and how Taffy tries to manage the fallout in real time. It is framed as a local, ground-level account of a single day rather than a broad survey of the wider events that led to it.
About the cast
Cliff Curtis leads as Sergeant Taffy Tawharau, with Poroaki Merritt-McDonald, Tame Iti, Jay Ryan, Manu Bennett, Simone Kessell, Roimata Fox and Ria Paki completing the cast. Tame Iti's presence is notable given the film's basis in real events. Director Tearepa Kahi builds the film around Curtis's central performance, using the ensemble to represent the different corners of the community the raid touches.
Context & significance
Muru is a New Zealand production set within the Māori community of Ruatoki, drawing its premise from an actual armed police operation carried out there. The film keeps its focus tight and local, an action-drama built around one community's day rather than a courtroom or political retrospective, and it arrives as part of a small but growing wave of New Zealand cinema that centers Māori stories and settings.
Watching Muru on Ktime
Muru streams on K-Time with a Farsi dub and Persian subtitles, making the film fully accessible to Persian-speaking audiences without relying on its original English-language audio. Watching requires only a free K-Time account login, and this page, including the background above, can be read without signing in. K-Time is built around a Farsi-first experience for the Iranian diaspora, and this title sits alongside other subtitled and dubbed international dramas in the catalog.