When choosing a film for this assignment, my original choice was Bend It Like Beckham because I had heard of it and I had a general idea what it was about. I then decided that I wanted to take on a more challenging film, one that I had never heard of, and one that I would really have to study to understand its full meaning. After looking into a few of the listed movies, I ended up choosing Whale Rider, a drama filmed in New Zealand in 2002. After watching the movie two times, I feel that I now understand some of the more drastic cultural and gender based problems that are occurring today. The film's plot follows the story of Paikea Apirana, yet she goes by the name Pai in the film. Pai is a 12-year-old girl who is the only remaining
Whale Rider exemplified the Ideology of Patriarchy perfectly because of how Koro ran his tribe. For generations, this tribe was always told that a man is to be the leader. When Pai is the only remaining family descendent, Koro becomes aggravated because she is female and will not be able to carry on the tradition of men as leaders. As the movie progresses, you begin to notice that Koro is slowly starting to accept the fact that maybe his granddaughter is fit to be a leader of their tribe. This leads to the second concept that I feel was expressed which is the idea of identification and the extent to which an individual is likely to make a decision that aligns with organizational objectives. When Koro originally has the feeling that Pai is not suitable to be leader, he is under the impression that he has to find someone outside of the family to take over his role once he passes. He soon realizes that the real thing that he should be focusing on is keeping the leader role in the family. Identification is accomplished by accepting the importance of family and what it means to be true and respecting of those who are closest to you in your life.
The theory of identification also carries over to idea of the control that Koro has over his tribe. When Koro initially begins scouting young boys around the tribe in order to find his next leader, he set up training and a series of tasks each person