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Apr 2, 2024 · Apparently, there were many ‘Pakeha’ women taken at the time by Maori tribesmen. River Queen is set in 1860’s New Zealand as Sarah and her father, an Irish doctor, are living on the frontier – the last military outpost before Maori territory began.
- Recovering The Historical moment.
- Romance in Captivity: The Problem of Culture.
- Love’s Triumphs: New Worlds.
- Film, Historiography, and Feeling
- Works Cited
The historian Robert Brent Toplin, surveying the popular historical film, sees Hollywood’s deployment of “elements of romance” in such films as a way to “enhance audience interest”—and, by extension, to increase profits (19). Such an approach, however, ends up treating a film’s un-historical elements simply as instances of conventional storytelling...
Ward’s own comments on the fictions he most values—the Odyssey, Gilgamesh, Beowulf—suggest the filmmaker’s interest in epic, and River Queen has been read by other scholars in this context. Certainly there is an epic scope and agency to the film’s unusually active heroine, crafted out of local memories of the extraordinary lives of two women. My se...
The history of women captured, but choosing to live with their captors, taking lovers and husbands from among them—a history that already, itself, partakes of romance—helps Ward negotiate the sometimes conflicting demands of historiography and love story in River Queen. Clearly it supports the final turn in this story, when Sarah takes her Maori lo...
The Australian historian Mark McKenna notes the “sheer force of frontier history” that leads writers to feel “they cannot understand the country in which they live without first confronting the history of dispossession.” He argues that “there is never one moment when the past dissolves completely, leaving a new landscape in its wake” (106) It is di...
Agnew, Vanessa. “Introduction: What Is Reenactment.” Criticism46.3 (2004): 327-39. Print. Babington, Bruce. “Epos Indigenized: the New Zealand Wars Films from Rudall Hayward to Vincent Ward.” The Epic Film In World Culture. Ed. Robert Burgoyne. New York: Routledge, 2011, 235-60. Print. Belich, James. The New Zealand Wars. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 19...
- Roger Nicholson
- 2011
Alexander Bisley of The Dominion Post says " River Queen convinces that you don't have to be indigenous to tell indigenous stories. Ward who lived for 18 months as the sole Pākehā (person of European descent) in a remote Māori community in the Ureweras, deserves a lot of mana (respect).
An intimate story set during the 1860s in which a young Irish woman Sarah and her family find themselves on both sides of the turbulent wars between British and Maori during the British colonization of New Zealand.
the furthest outpost, a young Irish woman's life is torn apart when her son is taken from her and brought up river by his Maori Grandfather. Unsure whether or not he is even alive she continues her search for seven long years... Caught between two sides, River Queen tells the story of a
River’s – and Maori spirituality… A second viewing swayed a few initial doubts. Like Whale Rider and Rabbit-Proof Fence, River Queen convinces that you don’t have to be indigenous to tell indigenous stories. Ward, who lived for 18 months as the sole Pakeha in a remote Maori community in the Ureweras, deserves a lot of mana.
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A young Irish woman named Sarah (Samantha Morton) lives at a riverside frontier garrison with her father (Stephen Rea), who is a surgeon for the English army.
