Watch for it in theatres

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Whale Rider, a new film to be released this month in Canada, is inspired by the Ngati Kanohi, the Indigenous New Zealanders' creation story. Ironically, the movie is written and directed by a pakeha, a white New Zealander. Her name is Niki Caro.

"The people who owned the legend were very clear with me and with others about the fact that I was the one they were backing to tell it," the filmmaker said. "That was important to me."

The Whale Rider was Paikea who arrived in New Zealand on the back of a whale in search of a home. In the Polynesian archipelago, paikeas are tiny crabs that resolutely cling to the shore during a storm, and to many Indigenous groups Paikea is known as a forbidding sea god.

In Whale Rider, Pai (Keisha Castle-Hughes), an 11-year-old girl, is the only heir in a long line of male chiefs descended from Paikea. Pai's father refuses his inherited title after his wife and Pai's male twin die in childbirth. Women cannot be potentates in Maori society, so Pai's grandfather, Koro, begins a search for a chief among the boys of the village.

Flowers, Pai's grandmother, encourages Pai until the wispy cynosure can assume her proper place among her male relatives.

Whale Rider is based on a book by Maori author Witi Ihimaera, and was filmed on the mostly Native East Coast of New Zealand. The script went to the Ngati Kanohi Elders for approval before shooting began.

"They gave the work their blessing," the filmmaker said.

"I felt a huge responsibility to this project, the privilege of adapting a work by Witi, who is an incredible writer, and then the tremendous responsibility to the community that actually live in the region of the Whale Rider, then to Paikea himself, to the legend itself."