Rain of the Children

About

Rain of the Children is a cinema feature film which has been described as Vincent Ward’s most personal film ever. Narrating and appearing on camera himself, Ward tells of his journey to uncover the story of Puhi, the Tuhoe woman he filmed in the late 1970s. It is spiked with drama scenes featuring Puhi’s young relatives acting alongside some of New Zealand’s best-known actors, bringing Puhi’s story to life.

When Vincent Ward was 21, fresh out of art school, he made a documentary film, In Spring One Plants Alone, which won international awards and acclaim and set him on his path as a filmmaker with a unique vision.

It was a simple, observational documentary about the day-to-day life of a Maori woman, Puhi, who lived in a remote part of Tuhoe country in the Urewera Ranges looking after her adult son, Niki, a violent schizophrenic. Ward lived with Puhi for 18 months. In 1980, shortly after the film was finished, Puhi died. He was overseas and missed her funeral.

In Rain of the Children, Ward comes full circle to unravel the mystery hidden at the heart of his early film: “People said that she walked in two worlds, the living and the dead. But gradually I began to understand that the personal dramas in her past were the key to understanding who she had become and why she was so obsessed with her last remaining son. It wasn’t simply that she had been involved with the legendary prophet Rua Kenana or that she was in the most tumultuous police raid of the 20th Century, I felt there was something else hidden in her life that had shaped it. I had become so close to her that I felt impelled to go back and find out what it was.”

For 30 years Ward has been haunted by his memories of Puhi and that experience. Now as he dramatises her story, he resolves many of his unanswered questions: why did locals call her “the burdened one?” What was she trying to avert with her constant praying? And how was this connected with her obsessive caring for her son, Niki? Why did some people say she was cursed? And why was there scant sign of her other children?

He says: “These questions were outside the scope of my earlier film, which was purely observational “fly on the wall” documentary – its terrain was the here-and-now.

“Our relationship was built on: ‘I’ll take you places and I’ll do whatever you want and I’ll accept you totally: just as you accept me.’ It was a kind of trade, and in return she would allow me to make my documentary.

“I wanted to just accept her, after all, I was 21 and in some ways she was like the grandmother I didn’t know. I did not want to openly question her too much about her past, although I would catch glimpses. I was observing her current way of life and I feared that if I questioned her too much she would become uncomfortable and close up.”

Over the past four years, he has gone back and researched Puhi’s life, talking to her descendants, her extended family, Tuhoe historians, and Judith Binney, who interviewed Puhi for her book Mihaia: The Prophet Rua Kenana and his Community at Maungapohatu at about the same time as Ward filmed her.

The result is Rain of the Children, a cinema feature which explores his relationship with Puhi, and leads into his telling of the extraordinary story of her life. Through Ward’s eyes, we learn that Puhi was the daughter-in-law of the great Tuhoe prophet, Rua Kenana, who led his people to build a visionary settlement on their sacred mountain, Maungapohatu. At the age of 12, she was given to Rua’s son Whatu in an arranged marriage. Rua named her Puhi, “the special one”, elevating her to a position akin to a princess within his movement. In 1916, when the township was invaded by police and Rua and Whatu were arrested and another of Rua’s sons (her close friend Toko) was killed, pregnant teenager Puhi escaped and had her baby in the bush, alone.

She went on to have 13 more children. Most were taken away from her, either through death or claimed by the whanau to be brought up by others. Always a spirited character, there are stories of her challenging and humiliating her second husband, Kahukura, a tribal tohunga, by performing whakapohane, the ritual baring of her buttocks at him in public.

Her third husband, Clarkie, was mysteriously killed in a fight with another family member said to be protecting Puhi. Niki, her son with Clarkie, was her last dependent child. At the time Ward found her in 1978, she was living in fear of the adult Niki’s violent outbursts and worried about how he would survive after her death.

Rain of the Children is told in unique Vincent Ward style – a compelling mixture of drama, documentary and personal narrative that he describes as part folk tale, part ballad, part mystery story. Striking unexpected emotional beats in its layered succession of revelations, the film takes the story of one woman’s life and gives a rare glimpse into the much bigger picture of Tuhoe history.

Ward says: “It also raised questions for me about the contradictions of love, and most mysteriously of all: the nature of a curse. How would you know if this had come upon you? And would it be passed down to others in your family line? Why would some avoid it and others not? And was Niki susceptible to it? When Puhi died, would it carry on down to him?

“I don’t know that I personally believe in curses, but I do believe that if you believe in a curse it has tremendous power and can absolutely affect you. There’s no question in my mind that Puhi believed in curses - she gave advice to others about what to do if such a fate befell you, and her son Niki also talked about them.

“So in some respects it was not a total surprise to me when some people who knew her said that Puhi was cursed. She had some terrible misfortunes. Within her community and within Maori tradition there’s a long history of trying to explain events that there was not at the time a rational explanation for. She was born into a period when the very survival of the tribe itself was in the balance. Why would one-third of the tribe be wiped out in the 1890s with disease when far fewer in the European community were dying? Had they done something wrong? These were the type of questions her people would ask. People look for a reason and they figure they’ve probably transgressed or somebody had put a curse or a makutu on them. It was a similar process that happened to Puhi, and became a way of explaining the things that happened to her.”

Fellow producer Tainui Stephens (whose wife, Wiha Te Raki Hawea-Stephens, is Tuhoe and worked on the film as one of the translators) notes there is no denying the presence of curses in Maori society, ancient and modern.

“I see it in terms of utu or karma. You do good: get good. You do bad: get bad. People exude negativity or positivity and this can rebound on them. I don’t think it’s rocket science to understand that kind of reciprocity. So I was happy to see it included in the film as long as it was not put over in a way to generate scorn or disbelief, but the sheer humanity of the people and the way they talk gives the lie to that anyway. And the events are so tragic I think anyone can be forgiven for believing that they have been cursed.”

For Ward, making the film was a learning process: “For me, now, the overriding thing about Puhi’s life is summed up in the Tuhoe expression ‘matemate ā one’ – a love so great it goes beyond death. It was there in her everyday life when she would feed other people even if it meant there was no food left for herself. Or talking with her dead children whilst making the karanga to the dead at funerals. Or attending a person lying in state for three days without eating, where she would, to all intents and purposes, disappear and become one with the dead. In other words, a love in which you gave beyond self, selflessly.

“With the title, Rain of the Children, Ward notes, “I was thinking of Puhi bearing so many of children, as if they had come to her like rain, that she was somehow awash with children. Then just as easily as they came they were washed away - gone to disease - or to be brought up by others until she was left with only one, totally dependant, son.

“So that is how the title came to me - it was if it rained children - in the first instance down upon her, they all came so easily, then it was as if the rain swept them away from her, out of her reach.”

Tainui Stephens’ take on the film’s title: “There’s something enigmatic about the title Rain of the Children, which I think works well. Whether it’s heard as ‘reign’ or ‘rain’ of the children, whether it alludes to the pre-eminence that children ought to have in our world or the idea of mourning through tears (rain) the fate of children, what came through in this story was the suffering of the children, but most of all the suffering of a mother who at times failed and at times was thwarted in her need to be a mother.”