A pleasant family film which some fool rated PG-13 (apparently for a passing flash on drugs, which I somehow failed to notice).

The plot has to do with old folks who look back to a better time, and young people who have to live with the future — which may or may not be better, but that’s their decision. Somewhere on North Island, New Zealand — apparently in the vicinity of Whangaroa — there is a seaside Maori community which, on the surface, seems to be modern suburbanite (they have not only bicycles but SUVs and bungalows to live in, and their sons go off to Europe to put on art shows and negotiate for gallery space) but in which not only the older people but also the younger ones are anxious to maintain certain of the old ways. To save the old ways, Koro (Rawiri Paratene), father of two sons who have both failed to become the prophet that he wants to rescue their people, anxiously awaits the birth of his grandson, who will be, in some sense, Paikea, the legendary “whale rider” who brought their people to New Zealand a thousand years ago. But his daughter-in-law fails him; she produces twins and then dies, along with the boy child, leaving only an infant daughter to whom Koro’s son Porourangi (Cliff Curtis) applies the sacred name in defiance of his father.

Paikea, as a pre-teen girl (Keisha Castle-Hughes, who, given the opportunity, could grow into a lucrative acting career), has a rather mixed relationship with her grandfather, her father having bunked off sometime earlier. Koro obviously loves his granddaughter, and will do many things for her — riding her to school every day of the week on his bicycle and then picking her up to take her home — but he cannot get past the idea that the reborn “whale rider” has to be a boy, and when he starts a class to determine who will be the next chief, Paikea is rebuked when she tries to participate and then sternly excluded. But Paikea manages to learn everything she needs to know, and to surpass all her male contemporaries. In the end, it’s made more than obvious who will be the whale rider who restores Maori greatness (though perhaps not completely in the way her grandfather imagined).

Fun story, marvellous cinematography. There is a bit of the Maori language in the film, some of which is subtitled; otherwise, I understood only a couple of words (“Tangaroa”, a Polynesian god, and “kaora”, which from context is the same as the Fatu Hivan “kaoha” — hello, welcome). The Maori in the film mostly speak in a variant of English which I suppose is standard Enzedder English and has deviated enough from both the British and American versions that I had to listen very, very hard to catch most of it — it is not Strine, but a local variant.

This is one I want on DVD when it’s released in that format. And, hopefully, in a few weeks it will get a somewhat wider cinematic distribution than it’s currently getting.