Berlin International Film Festival 2006

Dir:Terrence Malick

Dir:Terrence Malick

'The New World' is a timely film for a popular audience that will redefine the figure of Pocahontas for the generation of young women who were raised on the saccharine world of Disney's animation and the heavily marketed dolls and baubles of their childhood.

With stunning photography and a soundtrack that leans heavily on Wagner and Mozart, until the final sequences in England when early English music takes over, the young woman's coming of age between two warring cultures is portrayed as a series of contradictions in which her personal experiences and conflicting loyalties are foremost. Her romance with John Smith is first indulged by her father, until she is cast out of her tribe and she inadvertently betrays them. Her second marriage to an English settler brings complete immersion in a European culture beset with religious conflicts, the desire to recast its social structures and the stirrings of imperialist ambition. Her life as an English gentlewoman living in a country house on a large estate is for her a 'New World' so strikingly different from anything we have seen in the new world of the Americas, that her assimilation is perhaps the strangest element in the whole movie and her presentation to the King and Queen at the 'Court of St. James' less the 'high point' of her story, than a symbol of her exception character and agreeable personality.

The story of John Smith and Pocahontas is part of American and British mythology, based on real events in the early seventeenth century, when the young native American woman arrived in England and caused a sensation. The story of the Jamestown settlement is well documented and Malick's movie is historically faithful down to the last detail of costume and architecture, not only for the settlement itself, where every hut can be identified from maps and illustrations, but also in the recreation of the indigenous settlements.

This film is remarkable for its convincing recreation of life in the Virginias and for discovering, Q'Orianka Kilcher, who plays Pocahontas and turned sixteen-years-old on the day of the film's premiere in Berlin.