By FRANCES GRANT
The little girl Hinewehi Mohi is cradling in her arms cannot speak. Singer-songwriter Mohi constantly fills the silence of her daughter Hineraukatauri with music, crooning and singsong baby talk.
Hineraukatauri, named for the Maori goddess of music, was born with cerebral palsy. As well as not being able to talk or walk she can't even eat or breathe unaided.
But the beautiful four-year-old at the centre of TV One's Christmas Eve documentary Her Daughter's Voice is mesmerising. The camera lingers on her face and hovers around her — as do all, it seems, who come into contact with this child.
Although Hineraukatauri can express herself only through smiles and tears, her spirit shines through, making Her Daughter's Voice more than fitting for Christmas, the season which celebrates the birth of a special baby.
It is this spirit which Mohi has credited as the inspiration for her hit album Oceania, a blend of traditional Maori music forms and modern dance-beats.
The music, Mohi says, is a release of everything she was feeling in the first difficult year after Hine's birth when she faced a future as a solo mother with a severely dependent child. But it is also, "a celebration of Hineraukatauri's survival and vitality."
The documentary, made by Greenstone, follows Mohi as she sets out to promote Oceania at home and overseas.
It revisits the controversy which flared after Mohi sang the New Zealand national anthem in Maori at Twickenham in last year's Rugby World Cup — more food for reconsideration in the season of good will.
Mohi, a passionate promoter of Maori language and culture in her music, remembers her dismay at the time. She couldn't understand, she says, why people were "getting down on me for the thing I do best."
But Her Daughter's Voice is primarily a love story: the love between mother and daughter, the love Mohi finds with new partner and then husband George, and the love of friends and whanau who have helped her with the intensive and complex medical care that Hineraukatauri requires.
It also shows the odds along the way: the difficult decisions Mohi must make in
balancing her desire to include Hinerauka-tauri in every aspect of her life against what is best, medically, for her daughter. There is also the conflict she feels between the demands of promoting her music and a longing for "a stable lifestyle settling down to a nice little whare in the 'burbs."
Hineraukatauri can't say what she prefers. But what the little girl gives her mother, her family and those who meet her is what Mohi describes as "the beauty of her silence."
Her Daughter's Voice
TV One, Sunday, 7.35 pm
TV: Music from the sound of silence
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.