New Zealand International Film Festival: Rain of the Children

A must see in the New Zealand International Film Festival, Rain of the Children is Vincent Ward's deeply personal and incredibly moving film which unravels and re-imagines the story of Puhi, the Tuhoe woman he documented in 1978 for his early film In Spring One Plants Alone.

Then Puhi was 80 and caring for her schizophrenic adult son, and Ward was 21, a young art student capturing her way of life. While not the subject of his earlier film, Puhi believed herself to be cursed, and this unknowable curse is what preoccupies Ward now. Puhi, he discovers, was an extraordinary woman. Chosen by Tuhoe prophet Rua Kenana to marry his son, she survived the 1916 police raid on Rua's Maungapohatu community and went on to have 14 children.

Cutting between early footage, his own to-camera narration, contemporary interviews with Tuhoe descendents, and magnificently recreated historical sequences (featuring Rena Owen as the older Puhi among a superb cast of Maori actors); Ward reveals both the heartrending background of Puhi's belief in the curse, and her lasting power over him.


Director: Vincent Ward
Producers: Vincent Ward, Marg Slater, Tainui Stephens
Iwi co-producer: Kero Nancy Tait
Co-producer: Catherine Fitzgerald
Screenplay: Vincent Ward
Photography: Leon Narbey, Adam Clark
Editor: Chris Plummer
Production designer: Shayne Radford
Music: John Gibson, Jack Body

In English and Maori with English subtitles