Rain of the Children

Haven't been to the cinema for ages but got there this afternoon. Went to see a film called Rain of the Children, a quite extraordinary documentary by Kiwi filmmaker Vincent Ward. 30 years ago Ward - then 21 - spent two years living with an old Maori woman named Puhi and her son, filming them. He wanted to find out more about her and discovered she had lived through one of the most significant periods in NZ history. She belonged to the Tuhoe tribe (nowadays fiercely independent) who come from the Ureweras on the East Coast of the North Island. In the early 1900s, shortly after her birth, a prophet named Rua led the Tuhoe people back to their sacred mountain Maungapohata and established a settlement there. He was trying to save them from the various Western diseases brought by the British settlers, and they also believed the tribe had been cursed because there had been natural disasters and so on. So Rua set up this town literally in the middle of nowhere. Puhi was married to his eldest son when she was only 14. But shortly after that the town was raided by policemen, and from there on in her life became fraught with bad luck. She - and the tribe - ended up believing she was cursed. She had 14 children and most of them died, she was married three times, and her last son was mentally ill so she spent her old age doing absolutely everything for him. Ward's reconstructed her life and the film's a mixture of archive photographs, his film from 1978, him revisiting her home, and interviews with the Tuhoe people about Puhi and her son. It's absolutely fascinating, especially when you consider it all happened not that long ago. And it's clearly a very personal film for Ward himself. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

I did feel however that if we were viewing Rua through Westernised, contemporary lenses (which we can't), Maungapohata would have been seen as a cult. He was a healer, a prophet, the self-proclaimed leader of his people, and he took as wives women who were apparently barren in order to give them children (yes, really). But I think cult is not an applicable word really because of the time and place in which he lived.