There are a lot of wonderful things about the New Zealand film Whale Rider, and the best of those things is the performance from newcomer Keisha Castle-Hughes.

Whale Rider is a contemporary fable about Maori legend and a coming-of-age story about a brave adolescent girl, Pai (Castle-Hughes). Narrating the story of her own birth, Pai, now aged 12, tells of how she survived but her long-awaited twin brother, the first-born male and all that, died at birth.
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