Whale Rider

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Indigenous myth telling can be complicated to western minds that have blurred Finding Nemo with Joanah (or was that Pinnochio) and the Whale, but this expertly told story lends itself well to both myth and entertainment. After languishing in “development-hell” for nearly a decade, the last rewrite of Witi Ihimaera’s novel, The Whale Rider was finished by Niki Caro. She then directed this, her second film, to become New Zealand’s biggest screen hit ever.

Filmed in Whangara, there’s not much of the fabled New Zealand scenery to be had in this film, but from the vista of our seats the panorama of feelings that play on the fine featured face of Keisha Castle-Hughes were enough to make truck drivers weep. Between this young actress and her grandfather, played by Rawiri Parantene, lies the story of a conflict that makes you forget you’re watching a movie. Suddenly you’re transported to your own family, your own childhood, your own conflict with tradition and growing up in a world that is changing around you.

New Zealand has a long history of woman’s rights being the first country in the world to grant women the right to vote (1893) and this story plunges, with great cultural sensitivity, into the coming-of-age, coming-to-power of a young Maori girl. The pre-teen Pai has been raised by her grandparents in a cultural setting that might be compared to “the Res with water” for Maori’s. Early in the story, when she chides the older Maori women for smoking, you know immediately that this youngster is a leader. Sadly, in the patriarchal mind-set of Paka, her grandfather and the tribal leader, she is a woman and not worthy to be consider as the one to lead their people. Throughout, the youngster pushes the lines of tradition and with each insurgence she pushes her grandfather’s love further and further from her. At a time when most children are busy testing authority, Pai tests Maori tradition with a vigor and an unrelenting wisdom that becomes a battle, one she knows intuitively she will win.

No car chases here, no shootings, no plot-points that immerse us in blood, Whale Rider is driven by hard-core acting and a display of changing tradition that is rarely revealed with such care. Oh yes ... there is also whale riding.