Setting off with few supplies and a sailing vessel that is essentially a homemade windsurfing board, Tama eventually washes up on yet another island, badly sunburned and dehydrated.

He promises Mahana that someday he will return for her. Outcasts both, Tama and Mahana develop a special childhood friendship, until Tama decides to run away in search of his real family. Tama is bounced from one unwanting family to the next, eventually ending up in the home of the village drunkard, whose daughter, Mahana (Fokikovi Soakimi), is considered to be the ugliest and most undesirable girl in the village. At first deemed to be a gift from the gods, he is christened Tama by the island’s imposing tribal chief (Rawiri Paratene, memorable as the grandfather in “Whale Rider”) and raised as the chief’s own son.īut as Tama (played as a youngster by Tausani Simei-Barton) grows up, his constant clumsiness and bad luck convince the villagers he is cursed. Co-screenwriters Garbett and Riwia Brown (“Once Were Warriors”) have opted to keep McGerr’s tale more or less intact as the third act of the film, concocting an elaborate backstory for the characters that accounts for most of pic’s first hour.Ī baby boy mysteriously washes off Malio Island during a fierce rainstorm. Of course, some short stories were meant to remain exactly that. Like its 1969 predecessor, distributed as a secular educational film, pic is derived from the short story “Johnny Lingo’s Eight Cow Wife,” written by the late novelist Patricia McGerr, a Catholic. This pic, while retaining the earlier film’s scenic Polynesian setting, is notably more secular in its approach, preaching only the gospel of taking responsibility for one’s own actions and not judging a book by its cover. Molen (a regular producer of Steven Spielberg’s films) and John Garbett, and editor Steven Ramirez, here taking on helmer duties as well. Pic reps a reunion for several of the key creative participants behind the 2001 Mormon missionary drama “The Other Side of Heaven”: producers Gerald R.

Johnny lingo