WARD, VINCENT (1956– ). Working as a director, writer, actor, producer, and art director, Vincent Ward has become one of New Zealand’s most accomplished filmmakers, in part through his ability to create arresting visual narratives. Doubtless, his training as a painter and his two-year experience living in an isolated Maori community has played some part in this. He cowrote and directed his first short film, A State of Sedge, while still a student. His second film was a *documentary that explored the relationship between a middle-aged schizophrenic man and his Maori mother, In Spring One Plants Alone. His feature directorial debut, Vigil (1984), established his reputation as a writer and filmmaker of power and poetry. Shot at the foot of Mount Messenger, the *coming-of-age film is visually stunning and narratively uneven and received mixed reviews. However, as New Zealand’s first entry in competition at Cannes in 1984, it received a standing ovation and Ward was nominated for the Golden Palm. Back in New Zealand, Ward—with cowriter Graeme Tetley—won the best original screenplay prize at the 1986 New Zealand Film and Television Awards, and the film also won best cinematography and best production design.
Ward then directed the Australian/New Zealand coproduction The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (1988), for which he had the original idea and was one of the writers. The story involves a young boy who digs a hole in medieval England and arrives in present-day New Zealand, but the film cannot be paraphrased so easily. Suffice to say that Ward received a five-minute standing ovation at Cannes in 1988, and he was nominated again for the Golden Palm. The film won 11 prizes at the 1989 New Zealand Film and Television Awards, including best director, best film, best cinematography, and best original screenplay. At the 1988 *Australian Film Institute ceremony, it won six awards, including best film and best director, and was nominated for another two. It also won other international awards.
Moving into the international industry, Ward coproduced, directed, and created the story for the drama/romance Map of the Human Heart (1993), financed by international backers including the *Australian Film Finance Corporation, Vincent Ward films, as well as French, English, and American companies. The story of the love between a half-Eskimo boy, Avik, and a half-Cree Indian girl, Albertine, won critical acclaim in part because of the realism imparted when cast and crew flew in helicopters to Arctic ice floes in order to shoot the film. What Dreams May Come (1998) tells the story of the search of deceased painter Chris Williams (Robin Williams) for his widow, Annie (Annabella Sciorra), who has committed suicide in grief and has gone to a different place. Ward envisions the afterlife as a painted world, a filmic world of new technologies.
Ward wrote the story for Alien 3 (1992), and acted as one of the businessmen in the brilliant Mike Figgis-directed Leaving Las Vegas (1995). He played Smith in the American comedy The Shot (1996) and Nathan in another Mike Figgis film, One Night Stand (1997). He was executive producer for Edwin Zwick’s The Last Samurai (2003). Although he has moved into the international industry, his contribution may be to enrich the stories of other cultures and times in the same way that he has for New Zealand.
WATKIN, IAN (1940– ). In terms of numbers of films, Ian Watkin is one of the most-filmed actors in the New Zealand film industry. Predominantly known as an actor, Watkin was also a writer—with Bruno Lawrence, Martyn Sanderson, and Geoff Murphy—of Wild Man (1977). Directed by Murphy, this *comedy stars Lawrence, Tony Barry, and Sanderson, in a story about two conmen who operated in the semi-lawless goldfields of the west coast of the South Island in the latter half of the 19th century. He then played Dudley in Roger Donaldson’s Sleeping Dogs (1977)—which starred Sam Neill, a fiction about revolutionaries in a right-wing state, and the practice of “ahimsa,” or nonviolence. Although not widely seen, Donaldson’s Nutcase (1980) is an amusing parody of the gangster *genre, with Watkin as Godzilla. He then played Kevin Ryan in John Laing’s Beyond Reasonable Doubt (1980), the story of a much-publicized murder trial and retrial, conviction, and subsequent pardon of an innocent man.
The role of Mears in Laing’s The Lost Tribe (1983) followed, an adventure/thriller about an anthropologist who disappears while looking for a lost tribe. In Utu (1983), Watkin plays the Doorman in a film about the Maori wars of the 1860s. He followed this with the part of Bill in Death Warmed Up (1985), a horror/thriller about a young boy seeking revenge on a scientist who caused him to kill his parents. As Father Vincent in the excruciating My Grandfather Is a Vampire (1991), he was practicing for his next role as Uncle Les in Peter Jackson’s splatter film Braindead (1992). This is a hilarious and sometimes gross horror film about Lionel and his girlfriend, watched over by his mother, who is bitten by a Rat Monkey and begins acting very strangely indeed. A long time passed before his next film role, in Mark Beesley’s Savage Honeymoon (2000), a comedy about sex, rock ’n’ roll, motorbikes, and alcohol.
Other films include Middle Age Spread (1979), Goodbye Pork Pie (1980), Bad Blood (1981), Carry Me Back (1982), Pallet on the Floor (1984), Send a Gorilla (1988), and Just Me and Mario (1988).
WHALE RIDER (TE KAIEKE TOHORA) (2002). Niki Caro directed one short film in 1994 and a feature in 1997 before adapting the screenplay for Whale Rider from a novel by Sir Witi Ihimaera. While Peter Jackson made New Zealand a household term for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Niki Caro emerged from relative obscurity to international significance through the creation of a story of the overcoming of cultural and personal limitations by a young Maori girl, Paikea—played by Keisha Castle-Hughes in a role that won international critical acclaim. The story itself is modeled on the contemporary favorite of a young girl overcoming barriers to achieve, in what is portrayed as a patriarchal system of tribal leadership. The power of the story lies in its recreation as a tale of beauty and sense of triumph, rather than its ideological content. Pai is effectively an orphan, brought up by grandparents in a tribe that will become leaderless after the male grandparent dies. Through her mastery of the initiation processes, Pai proves to herself and the tribe that limitations are meant to be broken, and are simply social constructions in most instances.
Whale Rider scooped the pool at the 2003 New Zealand Film and Television Awards—being nominated for four prizes including best actor and best supporting actor—and winning nine prizes, including best film, best screenplay, best director, and best actress. It was nominated for and won many awards internationally: the film won a British Academy of Film and Television Arts children’s award, and was nominated for both an *Australian Film Institute award for best foreign film and an Academy Award for best actress in a leading role.