At our next event The Whiteside Forum will host the movie “Whale Rider.” It is about a young Maori girl and her family and community in New Zealand. This 2002 film won many awards before its July 4, 2003, release in the United States.
“Whale Rider,” starring Keisha Castle-Hughes, will be shown on Thursday, February 27, 2014, at the Odell Public Library, 307 S. Madison Street, Morrison, IL. We will be in the City of Morrison Community Room. The film begins at 6:30 p.m. and runs 1 hour, 41 minutes.
It will be a great lead-in to our Friday, April 11, conference on Indigenous Peoples.
You can find out more about the movie at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298228/ or http://www.whaleriderthemovie.co.nz/.
Film critic Roger Ebert stated, “[Despite its] ethnic, uplifting, and feminist [storyline], the genius of the movie is the way it sidesteps all of the obvious cliches of the underlying story and makes itself fresh, observant, tough, and genuinely moving….[There is] something [unexpected] in a larger and more significant scale, that brings together all of the themes of the film into a magnificent final sequence. It’s not just an uplifting ending, but a transcendent one, inspired and inspiring, and we realize how special this movie really is. So many films by and about teenagers are mired in vulgarity and stupidity; this one, like its heroine, dares to dream.”