Whale Rider

The great news is that Whale Rider is easily the strongest New Zealand film since the early 90s peak of Heavenly Creatures, Once Were Warriors and The Piano.

Whale Rider, New Zealand, 2003

Director/writer: Niki Caro
Production co: South Pacific Pictures
Producers: Tim Sanders, John Barnett, Frank Hubner
Associate produer: Witi Ihimaera
Photography: Leon Narbey
Editor: David Coulson
Production designer: Grant Major
Costume designer: Kirsty Cameron
Based on the novel Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera

With: Keisha Castle Hughes (Paikea), Rawiri Paratene (Koro), Vicky Haughton (Nanny Flowers), Cliff Curtis (Porourangi), Grant Roa (Rawiri)

35mm, 97 minutes, Cinemascope, PG

Sundance Film Festival (Audience Award), BAFTA (Children’s Award, Best Feautre Film), 2003 Academy Award nomination (Kezia Castle-Hughes Best Actress in a Supporting Role) 2004

In a small New Zealand coastal village, Maori claim descent from Paikea, the Whale Rider. In every generation, a male heir has succeeded to the chiefly title. The time is now. When twins are born, and the boy twin dies, the chief is unable to accept his granddaughter, Pai, as a future leader. Koro, the chief, is convinced that the tribe’s misfortunes began at Pai’s birth and calls for his people to bring their sons to him, sure a new leader will be revealed. Pai loves Koro more than anyone in the world, but she must fight him and a thousand years of tradition to fulfil her destiny.

“The lush landscape of New Zealand is majestically filmed in the writer-director Niki Caro’s drama about a young girl (a radiant Keisha Castle-Hughes) who must persuade her Maori tribe that she was born to be their leader. It’s an empowerment fable, but done with disarming subtlety. Caro’s film avoids the mawkish and saccharine pitfalls of these sorts of stories, winning over the audience instead with a surefooted and inspiring sense of tradition.” — Bruce Diones, The New Yorker, 4/3/2004

“The great news is that Whale Rider is easily the strongest New Zealand film since the early 90s peak of Heavenly Creatures, Once Were Warriors and The Piano… Whale Rider is a confident blend of tragedy, comedy and innate, intuitive mysticism… In many ways, the girl Paikea’s story comes to follow the natural hero’s trajectory, as though she were King Arthur or Luke Skywalker – the child that no one expected to carry the birthright and lead the people – but it’s a trajectory charted with a heartwarming sense of humour, played like a cat and mouse game by Paratene and Castle-Hughes. Koro goes on pigheadedly training boys for the whale rider position – ‘I’m going to need all the first-born boys,’ he announces, oddly Herod-like – and those boys are clumsy dimwits who can’t hold a candle to the natural whale rider. So, if the plot’s ultimate destination is an inescapable inevitability, how it gets there is both moving and funny, while any political messages are smuggled in. The book’s politics felt that much more urgent and explicit, but 15 years after the book, the movie arrives in and from a New Zealand where girls can do anything and the survival of Maoritanga, in Ihimaera’s metaphorical guise of “whale riding”, is a given rather than a vexed question. Whale Rider feels like a celebration of both those things, and many others – it may even make you come over all patriotic, if you let it. You should.” — Philip Matthews, Listener, 25/1/2003

“The opening scenes of Whale Rider, director Niki Caro’s second feature film, make its mythic dimensions clear: whales move through the deep; a woman dies in childbirth; twins are born, but only the female infant survives; a father and son argue bitterly, beginning a decade-long rift. Whale Rider’s setting may be contemporary, but the plot points are pure fable. The Maori tribe into which the little girl Pai is born claims descent from Paikea, a legendary ancestor who travelled to New Zealand on the back of the whale, and they’re waiting for a first-born son to assume tribal leadership. Based on Witi Ihimaera’s 1987 young-adult novel, Whale Rider strips its story down to stark bones, losing much of the original’s sentiment and historical context, and giving Pai the narrative voice… Whatever popular success the film finds in the global village, however ‘universal’ the appeal of its story, Whale Rider is a profoundly New Zealand film. It issues a challenge to young Maori, who no longer draw their identity from their heritage; and to older Maori, whose rigid guardianship of cultural tradition contains it in the past. It issues a challenge to all New Zealanders, for whom history begins with Abel Tasman or Captain Cook, to find inspiration in the precolonial past and, implicitly, a way forward as a distinctive nation. Whale Rider asks New Zealanders to embrace what is theirs alone. That this message can’t survive the movie’s journey away from its cultural context into foreign markets does not diminish its significance.” — Paula Morris, Cineaste, Winter 2003

Screening: Whale Rider screened on 9 April 2009 in a series of features for children.