'Be rebellious against failure'

''That looks like that girl who played Pocahontas,'' said the coat check woman at the San Francisco Opera House as a striking young woman in a red evening gown passed by.

It was. ''That girl who played Pocahontas'' in the 2005 film ''The New World'' - 17-year-old actress Q'Orianka Kilcher - is now a young woman, with a new film and an articulate vision of the new world she wants to help create.

The film, based on the life of Princess Victoria Kaiulani of Hawaii, will be directed by Marc Forby and is scheduled for international release in late 2008.

Kilcher, who spent part of her childhood in Hawaii, believes she was cast as Kaiulani as much for her activism as her acting.

''They wanted somebody Hawaiian to play the role, but they presented my name to some really big people in Hawaii and they actually heard about my activism and said that there really is no other person that they would want to play the role.''

Kilcher is honored to have been selected for the part. ''Princess Kaiulani was truly an amazing person,'' she said.

Kaiulani was born in 1875 of a Kanaka Maoli mother and Scottish father. Kilcher is Quechua-Huachipaeri on her Peruvian father's side and Swiss-Alaskan on her mother's side. Both women have defended indigenous people in a time of cultural upheaval. Kaiulani, at 17, spoke in Washington on behalf of the Hawaiian nation after it was taken over by U.S. business interests in 1893. Kilcher speaks out in defense of peoples of the Peruvian Amazon, who are threatened by the exploitation of multinational corporations.

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