<<< back

A whale of a time for NZ film maker
The Melbourne Age
Friday September 27, 2002

After a ripping Australian presence in San Sebastian last year, it is New Zealand’s turn to make a splash. Niki Caro’s Whale Rider, an audience favourite in Toronto, has won hearts and been allotted an extra screening. With only one feature, Memory and Desire, under her belt, Caro is also a hot contender for the €150,000 ($A268,000) New Directors award.

A Maori community’s ancestors are said to have arrived from the sae on the backs of whales’ in the modern community, an intransigent elder struggles to imbue the boys with the skills and disciplines of their warrior forefathers, determined to resist the knowledge that his granddaughter Pai is the born tribal leader. The film successfully balances the gravity of legend and the laconic humor and lovingly detailed kitsch of antipodean, suburban realism. Every plate of meat-and-three-veg tells a story, but so does Pai’s voice as she summons the ancestors from the sea. The way to reach an international audience, says Caro, is through telling stories that are local, very rooted and that do not try to explain themselves as exotic. She was initially worried, she says, that foreign audiences would not “get” the significance to Maori people of place. “And everyone knows what it’s like to be a kid and know that you can do something, even if other people think you can’t,” she says.

Not that this means she wouldn’t entertain the idea of making a film elsewhere – “what interests me is a good story” – but Los Angeles’ lights no longer look as overwhelmingly bright as they did.

Peter Jackson, lord of Wellington’s Rings cycle – and Caro does speak of him with something like awe – has shown his compatriots that you can make the biggest film in the world and still enjoy a Steiny, in the evening.