Boy, written and directed by Taika Waititi, is a beautiful New Zealand film about an 11-year-old Māori boy's search for his “potential”. His name is Boy and he loves Michael Jackson. The film is set in 1984 and takes place in the picturesque community of Waihau Bay on the east coast of New Zealand. The boy lives with his grandmother, his younger brother Rocky and his cousins ​​and takes care of them when she is away. The two brothers grew up without the presence of their father Alamein because he was in prison for his involvement in criminal activities. The boy's father is his hero and is the subject of his many courageous fantasies as a diver, football star, military legend, and so on. Alamein suddenly returns after a seven-year absence which severely disrupts Boy's life. Themes and Context Boy explores themes of childhood, innocence, influence, duty and integrity and is, at times, funny, playful, serious and heavy. The film is a fiction and uses a chronological narrative that employs the classic cinematic model of Continuity editing defined by Berliner and Cohen as "a system of editing devices that establish a continuous presentation of space and time". Waititi's film makes use of the beautiful landscape with a multitude of shots and camera angles and offers the viewer an immersive experience. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and competed in the “World Cinema Narrative” category. This film is a representation of Māori reality as it would have been in the 1980s in a globalized and colonial context and Boy's obsession with Michael Jackson demonstrates a representation of the spread of Western culture in that time period. Critical Analysis Despite the Maori context and the location of Waititi's film, Boy seems to be...... at the center of the paper...... anywhere in the world and we can all learn from his story. Works Cited Todd Berliner and Dale J. Cohen, “The Illusion of Continuity: Active Perception and the Classical Editing System,” Journal Of Film & Video 63, no. 1 (2011): 45.RT Staff, “2010 Sundance Film Festival Lineup Announced,” Rotten Tomatoes (Flixster), December 2, 2009, http://www.rottentomatoes.com/news/1858193/2010_sundance_film_festival_lineup_announced (accessed April 16, 2014 ).Peter Debruge, “Review of Boy,” Variety, January 23, 2010, http://variety.com/2010/film/reviews/boy-1117941952 (accessed April 16, 2014).Ann Hardy, “Hidden Gods – Religion , spirituality and recent New Zealand cinema." Australian Film Studies 6, no. 1 (2012): 19. Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 259-260.