Wellywood Woman

Still from Mosquita Y Mari Each year I receive great emails from Jill Livestre, about the films I might enjoy at Out Takes , New Zealand's Reel Queer Film Festival, on in Auckland right now and opening tomorrow in Wellington. Many of the films in the festival will otherwise never reach a big screen here. (And because we're such a small country any 'niche' festival is challenging to organise sustainably. So I imagine that there are gaps because some films are unaffordable.) I treasure Out Takes , partly because it's the closest New Zealand has to a women's film festival: our last women's festival was Mahi Ata Mahi Atua: Women's Work in Film in 2003. Last year I was disappointed that Out Takes included few films directed by women and that the directors and actors were overwhelmingly white. But the gender mix this year is amazing and wonderful. Here are the stats, with last year's in brackets. Narrative films (long): twelve (22). Woman-directe...

Leonie Reynolds Leonie Reynolds is a scriptwriter and documentary filmmaker. Her documentaries and a short comedy have played on New Zealand television and in festivals both in New Zealand and overseas and her first documentary, Hard Words , won the Rangatahi Award at the New Zealand Media Peace Awards.

Leonie’s worked as a storyliner and dialogue scriptwriter for South Pacific Pictures’ Shortland Street and as a journalist, Leonie has written on theatre and film for many publications. Leonie’s Disappear in Light has just had its premiere at New Zealand’s Documentary Edge Festival. It’s an observational documentary about writer, performer and producer Jo Randerson and her largest scale theatre work to date:   Good Night - The End ,  a black comedy about death, and about what it means to engage with life. A woman filmmaker’s film about a woman writer is a rare event and I’ve been celebrating. Why did you want to make a film about Jo? I’ve been an admirer o...

We get Crime at 48 Hours. (Whew. We could have got Inspirational...) Deep gratitude for protagonist and other preparation, generous gift of remarkable poem. *And* we don't need to make blood. Input from three others on core team, in person and on Skype. First draft to them around 10.30 pm. Rewrite done by 2.20 am, via email, phone, and in person with core team neighbour. Sleep interrupted by new lines of dialogue and small structural change. All to Radio Access Wellington in the morning. The delights of a familiar, warm, and well-serviced indoor single location, fantastic crew, wonderful cast. Hang purple-painted canvas . Steady schedule to around 1.45 am. Final image: a sterling crew member vaccuuming the studio. Core team home. Listen to music files from fourth core team member, who's been working hard at home up the coast. Import, watch and annotate two hours and eight minutes of tapes. Regrets that we have too much footage to be sure that we'll always select...

In thirty-six hours, I'll write a 48 Hours script. A short. Scary. I was an assistant writer for five minutes last year, but I've never written a short before, though I've practised a bit over the last few weeks, working with the team to create a protagonist who can move across genres. And usually I write in the morning, edit in the arvo, so my body clock isn't oriented to Friday night writing! This morning I'm preoccupied with BLOOD. Just in case we get a bloody genre (twelve genres, assigned at random). I have a recipe with corn syrup. A recipe with golden syrup. Another one with chocolate syrup. But I need blue and red dye. Or blue and red paint. I have only alizarin crimson oil paint. Will have to go out. Sigh. Also want to paint the old canvas that Bridie Lonie made into a beautiful painting after we performed on it. Purple on its back, to cut out the white in one location. Just in case. Here we are performing. And GULP, I may be performing again (...

The art work for the card that Destri Martino is taking to Cannes It's the first day of the Cannes Film Festival 2012 and I'm thrilled that New Zealand film reviewer Sarah Watt is there and blogging . So is Destri Martino, whose short film The Director is screening in the Emerging Directors programme at the American pavilion and in the Short Film Corner. Destri's  UNGLAM CANNES  blog is wonderful, totally endearing for any woman who makes films and would like to go to Cannes, a real insiders guide. There are no women in competition for the Palme d'Or this year again, after a better year last year , and the protests are rising. From French women , for the first time that I'm aware of, and two of the authors, Virginie Despentes and Coline Serreau are directors, another lovely example of European women directors' activism to add to what I know of the Spanish women directors at CIMA . (The third author, Fanny Cottençon, is a comedienne).* As in Spain, these c...

      No podcast this week. Probably no post next week. Taking a break. If you're in Wellington, or planning a trip, you might like to visit Women: An Exhibition . As well as work from the guest artists and recent work from others, there's a small selection of work made during New Zealand's women's art movement of the 1970s and 1980s: Joanna Margaret Paul's Nappies film (1977) and her No 1 painting from 1979, some Allie Eagle work, a Heather McPherson poem. I made a little book which includes a brief gender analysis of Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand's contribution to Google Art (not good news). And there's a rare opportunity to see Maria MacKay's Schema (2001) and to buy one of only five prints made. This isn't a great reproduction below as the colours are off; it will reward a close look in the gallery. More Maria paintings  here . Meanwhile, just along the road at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery,  Bev Short's 'All ...