It has won audience awards at film fests from Rotterdam to Sundance, but no trophy is more impressive than the one Whale Rider earned at last year's Toronto International Film Festival.  In the seven years I've been attending Toronto, the audience has only abused their power once, for 1997's The Hanging Garden (it had the whole home-field advantage thing going for it). The other winners all became giant commercial hits and multi-Oscar nominees: Shine; Life Is Beautiful; American Beauty; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; and Amélie.

But those films all enjoyed huge, star-studded gala premieres in Toronto, whereas Rider slipped into town completely unnoticed yet managed to dispatch idiotic Hollywood crap like Antwone Fisher despite screening in the festival's smallest venues, having zero star recognition and containing a language that most people have never encountered, let alone can pronounce.  Why? Because it's the most magical film since Amélie, and it's the greatest fable since The Secret of Roan Inish.

Rider is set in New Zealand, on the Eastern Coast of the North Island in a village a Maori tribe (like the folks from Once Were Warriors) has called home for the last millennium or so.  Legend says the tribe's founding father, Paikea, rode into what eventually became Whangara on the back of a whale after being lost at sea.  Since then, the first-born male of the tribe's chief is, practically from conception, tagged as the group's next leader.

The primitive Whangara electoral college is brought to a screeching halt when the wife of the chief-to-be gives birth to twins.  The baby boy is stillborn, the mother dies during delivery, and a new baby girl survives unscathed...but nobody really seems to care.  Dad (Cliff Curtis, the bad guy from Collateral Damage) can't cope with what happened and takes off to sell his tribal wares around the world, leaving little Pai to be raised by a resentful grandfather (Rawiri Paratene).

Flash forward about a dozen years, where Pai (Keisha Castle-Hughes) seems to have gotten used to everyone's nearly blatant yet completely unfounded disappointment with her.  She's wise beyond her years, but nobody – especially Grandpa Koro – seems to notice because they're more concerned with their dying culture and customs.  While Koro fruitlessly searches for a leader among the young men in Whangara, he never once considers Pai.

I just read what I wrote and realized I'm making Rider sound like a formulaic coming-of-age tale, but it's far more than that.  Rider carefully avoids the usual two-dimensional characters that generally populate these films (in the same way Bend It Like Beckham is so much better than My Big Fat Greek Wedding).  And those pictures never feature leads quite as intriguing as Castle-Hughes, who comes off as a mélange of Joan of Arc, Colleen from the first Survivor and an awkward colt.  Her debut is the biggest star-making role in years, except, like Björk, Castle-Hughes swears she'll never act again. Unless Nicole Kidman develops the ability to fly (without the use of wires) in Cold Mountain, you're not going to see a better performance this year.

Rider was directed by Niki Caro, who adapted the screenplay from Witi Ihimaera's 1986 novel (the first Maori novel to be published in New Zealand).  Using stunning images from an already beautiful part of the world, a delicate score and Castle-Hughes's effective narration, she's crafted a real heart-tugging winner.

1:45 -

for brief language and a momentary drug reference