By B. Ruby Rich

NIKI CARO CARRIES in her wallet a photo of a young woman standing atop a giant, unmoving whale on an isolated beach at dawn. It's not a bad metaphor for embarking on the unknown, with equal parts temerity and trepidation. It's not a bad metaphor for filmmaking, either, considering that the young woman is Caro herself on the day she accepted Whale Rider as a film project and immediately heard of a whale dead on the sand near her beach house. "We've been haunted by whale strandings throughout this film process," she explains. "On the day we announced the film, two whales came into the bay [at Auckland], circled twice, and left. All the Maori people immediately said, 'Oh, you're blessed.' " Sitting in her Auckland kitchen, I study the photograph and I'm impressed.

After she consulted Maori friends, sure the whale stranding was a bad omen, Caro learned that traditionally "it was great luck to have a whale stranded like that – it meant that people got meat, oil, bone for weapons." Lucky, that, because the whales have kept on coming. Coinciding with the film's release in New Zealand, a mess of whales were stranded on its remote Stewart Island. When I saw Caro and her producer Linda Goldstein Knowlton in San Francisco on the day of her San Francisco International Film Festival screening this past spring, she mentioned a story on a big whale stranding in the Florida Keys (where a whale also was stranded at the time of her Sundance showing.) Some have escaped; some have died. By now, Caro is spooked: "Ask them to stop now, please. I know it's a good sign, but ask them to stop."

The film languished in development hell for more than a decade before landing in her lap for its final rewrite, Caro tells me as she chops vegetables and I admire the converted stable, where she lives with her architect husband and their soon-to-be-born child, who is due any day now. She hopes the film stays in theaters until the baby's arrival. It's already been screening for 19 weeks, second only to Once Were Warriors in New Zealand film history. In Australia, Whale Rider has surpassed it, becoming the highest-grossing New Zealand film ever shown. It's hard to believe, now, that for so many years, fits and starts plagued the film adaptation of celebrated Maori writer Witi Ihimaera's canonical novel (which was already mandatory reading in New Zealand high schools before hitting the big screen). Basking in awards from Maui to Rotterdam, Caro has an explanation for the long delay: "I honestly think it had to wait until the world was ready for it."

I'm not really supposed to be here – I'm en route to a conference and film festival jury in Australia – but it's just too tempting to play hooky and check up on the Whale Rider folks on the very eve (or afternoon, by now, for you) of its launch in the United States. How dear to my heart is Whale Rider, the little movie that could? Working for the Toronto International Film Festival last year, I "discovered" it in a drawer full of unsolicited work awaiting a turn on the VCR. The experience of watching the not-yet-finished film take form on the video monitor was truly one of those rare "aha" moments. As international film programmer, I got to invite the movie and its makers, introduce all of them at the world premiere, and watch, like a proud parent, the standing ovations, a tribute from a tearful Sam Neill, and the first audience award ever at Toronto for an "unknown" film.

Caro doesn't seem surprised by all this in the least, nor does she seem to derive the usual ego-fueled satisfaction that tends to inflate filmmakers when they jump to the mainstream this way. (I call it the "Sundance effect," when previously reasonable people suddenly morph into unbearable divas after receiving a festival award or distribution deal.) Being a New Zealander has given her an intriguing take on the cosmos: she truly believes this film willed itself into being and has somehow forged its own success.

In New Zealand, Maori culture is astonishingly integrated into the life of the nation. "It's really one of the only indigenous cultures in the world that has imposed its own culture on the colonizing culture," Caro tells me. She was acutely aware of her responsibility as a pakeha (white person) to get Maori culture right when she took on the film. She began to study the language "at least to get the pronunciation right," she says to underscore her fledgling comprehension. "I felt that it was a matter of respect."

I get a lesson in how material (as opposed to metaphoric) that integration is when the writer himself, Ihimaera, comes to take us out for lunch. Urban and urbane, he's a charming mischief-maker whose writings have been crucial to New Zealand's understanding of itself. A product of a Maori community, he grew up not far from Gilmore, where the film was shot after tribal elders gave it their blessing.

Whale Rider, the novel, has a great origin story. Prior to his current stint as a professor at the University of Auckland teaching Maori and Pacific Island diasporic literature, Ihimaera was in the diplomatic service. He was posted to the New York consulate office when a whale happened to wander into the Hudson River, causing quite a fuss and reminding him of home. Then his two daughters came to visit and he took them to see an Indiana Jones movie, after which they complained how unfair it was that movie heroes were always male. A myth was born.

In Auckland, Ihimaera is a dapper man-about-town. He picks us up in a black-leather-lined BMW, and we tool down a gorgeous shoreline road, Tamaki Drive, and stop at one particular vista for a walk. It's called Bastion Point, but its Maori name is Takaparawha. In 1977 a group of Maori calling themselves the Orakei Maori Action Committee occupied this point to stop its planned development by the city and to demand its return to the tribe. It was 506 days before the government sent in troops to clear them out. But in an unprecedented court case, the battle was won: today the Takaparawha Reserve is administered jointly by the Auckland City Council and the Ngati Whatua o Orakei Trust Board in a landmark settlement. After lunch Ihimaera gives me copies of two of his other novels, and I'm further surprised: The Uncle's Story and Nights in the Gardens of Spain are both wild coming-out stories, full of bravado and sexual adventure.

By the time I leave New Zealand (which I now know is also called "Aotearoa," its Maori name), I've learned that its enlightened prime minister, Helen Clarke, has given refugee status to Afghan youths and visits them at their school twice a year. I've learned she kept New Zealand out of the recent Iraq invasion, unlike its unfortunate neighbor Australia, dragged in by a conservative government. I've learned that New Zealand was the first country to grant women the vote – in 1893, decades ahead of the United States, Canada, and Europe. Significantly, its legislation specifically included Maori women as having that right. Absorbing this history, I begin to understand the tradition from which Whale Rider draws: one of female leadership, courage, racial and cultural equity, and political engagement. No wonder that Caro talks about her film as a "model of leadership for these dark times." Boarding the plane to Australia, I send up a wish that it inspires girls everywhere to pursue power and use it wisely.