Whale Rider

The critically acclaimed feature film Whale Rider, a powerful cinematic re-telling of an ancient Maori legend, airs on PBS stations on Sunday, July 24, at 9:00pm.

The broadcast premiere on PBS stars Keisha Castle-Hughes in her enchanting Oscar®-nominated performance as Pai, with three of New Zealand’s most distinguished actors: Rawiri Paratene as stern grandfather Koro, Vicky Haughton as Nanny Flowers and Cliff Curtis as Porourangi, Pai’s father.

A contemporary story of love, rejection and triumph as a young girl fights to fulfill her destiny, Whale Rider is directed by Niki Caro and based on the best-selling 1986 novel by award-winning New Zealand writer Witi Ihimaera (the first Maori novelist to be published in that country). Author Ihimaera was inspired to write Whale Rider after he had taken his daughters to a number of action movies and they asked why the boy was always the hero and the girl the one who was helpless. “So I decided to write a novel in which the girl is the hero.”

Shot entirely in Whangara, a coastal village on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island, Whale Rider re-interprets a 1,000-year-old legend about Paikea, the founder of the native New Zealand tribe Ngati Konohi, whose members believe their leader arrived in their village on the back of a whale after his canoe capsized.

Set in the present, Whale Rider focuses on Pai, a 12-year-old girl who dares to challenge the ancient traditions of her people, despite opposition from her grandfather Koro, the village chief. Who will become the tribe’s new leader after Koro? By tradition, it should be the eldest son. But Pai’s twin brother and mother died at birth, and her grief-stricken father has wandered off, causing a crisis in the transfer of power. Koro refuses to recognize that a girl could be the leader of the tribe.

Why can’t a girl enter the pantheon of leaders, Pai wonders? Koro finds the notion inconceivable. When he despairs of his son’s return, he begins teaching ancestral traditions to the boys of the village, hoping one will prove worthy to succeed him. Pai is forbidden to participate, but she watches, secretly, from the sidelines. When her moment comes, she is ready. It is through Pai’s singular quest for her grandfather’s love and acceptance that she discovers her destiny.

“Whale Rider is essentially about leadership and the fact that leadership presents itself in the form of a young girl,” explains director Niki Caro. “It’s Pai’s destiny to lead, but that is in direct opposition to her grandfather’s beliefs, and he’s the person she loves more than anything in the world. So the film deals with his struggle to accept her destiny and the extraordinary lengths to which she’ll go to make him understand her and prove her love to him.”

Winner of audience awards at the Sundance, Toronto and Rotterdam Film Festivals, Whale Rider is a radiant story about an exceptional girl’s coming of age and of a proud Maori community’s struggle to embrace new ways of thinking.