If Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh's Heavenly Creatures marks a watershed, it is because the next significant coming-of-age film made in New Zealand, Rain (Christine Jeffs, 2001), shows that the prevailing value system that had dominated society through the mid-twentieth century had been replaced by a new one. Instead of depicting children and young people wrestling with the destructive effects of puritanism and the oppressive social rigidities that it enforced, a younger generation of filmmakers born in the 1960s was beginning to make movies that reflected the move into hedonism and permissiveness that had followed the sexual revolution, together with a progressive dismantling of systems of domination in all domains of life. If the coming-of-age films of the preceding generation had shown the rigidity of the social values and practices of puritanism to be incapable of providing sensitive children with a ‘sense of secure holding,’ to use D. W. Winnicott's term, those made by the younger generation would show the new ‘liberated’ society to be equally defective in terms of furnishing children with the emotional security needed for wellbeing. While the environmental circumstances may have been different, their effects on children were equally disruptive, if for different reasons.

The first of the younger filmmakers to tackle these emerging new circumstances from the perspective of a young teenager undergoing a rite of passage was Christine Jeffs (born 1963), who attracted worldwide attention with her first feature film Rain, which had its première in the Director's Fortnight at Cannes. Jeffs adapted her film from an equally acclaimed first novel, Rain, published in 1994, by the New Zealand writer Kirsty Gunn (born 1960). While the film and the novel share a similarly critical view of the 1960s New Zealand society in which both Jeffs and Gunn had grown up, and the film replicates the basic story of, and a number of key events in, the novel, the way in which the film auteur and the literary author construe the meaning of the experience presented in these two works is significantly different.