Niki Caro's acclaimed film Whale Rider is the ambitious story of a young Maori girl's quest to prove herself to her grandfather and undertake his destiny as tribal leader. Her grandfather, the chief of Whangara, has old-fashioned attitudes that blind him to his granddaughter's potential as his successor. It is only when tragedy strikes that Pai can prove to his grandfather that his community's connection to the spiritual world of Māori endures. The focus on Maori culture and myth allows us to classify Whale Rider as a film that shows the protagonist, Pai, unable to "go home" and understand it through a connection between myth, culture and family. Myth: Myth comes from the Greek word mythos, meaning story or word, which explains the way the world is. In this context, Whale Rider depicts the world of the Maori. The Maori myth is that of Paikea, an ancestor of the Maori community who arrived in Aotearoa on the back of a whale. According to traditional myth, when the ancestor Paikea was lost at sea and fell from his canoe, he rode a whale which brought him to a coastal area of ​​New Zealand. This myth is told by Pai at the beginning of the film: My name is Paikea Apirana. And I come from a long line of leaders, stretching all the way to Hawaiki, where our elders are, those who were the first to hear the cries of the land and send a man. His name was also Paikea and I am his most recent descendant… But I was not the leader my grandfather expected. And when I was born, I broke the link with the elders. . . . “In the past, the earth felt a great void. He was waiting: he was waiting to be filled; waiting for someone to like him; while waiting for a leader. And he came on the back of a whale - a man to lead...... middle of paper ... and the understanding of the culture is interrupted because Koro does not allow it. Even after the boys failed to obtain the whale tooth necklace, the leader's emblem of leadership. Koro completely abandons any hope of finding a successor. He neglects the one who can do it. Pai needs to “go home”, to a spiritual “home”, but she is powerless in the face of her grandfather. :2, 24-27.Butler, Judith. Gender problem: feminism and identity subversion. New York: Routledge, 2006Women warriors: the environment of the mythJ. Donald HughesEnvironmental History, Vol. 12, no. 2 (April 2007), pp. 316-318Published by: Forest History Society and American Society for Environmental HistoryArticle Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25473078