Wellywood Woman

This year, with half the feature films funded by the New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC) directed by women, it's arguable that discrimination against women directors is in remission here. Though probably not far away. A bit like a herpes virus. Lurking forever within the body, grasping at opportunities to act. Globally, the good gender statistics now available from places like Australia, Sweden and the United States, show that for various reasons including discrimination, women direct far fewer feature films than men.  But the number of women directors of feature films is increasing, slowly. And more quickly in some places. Like the diverse Arab world and its diaspora. Two obvious examples are Nadine Labaki ( Caramel , Where Do We Go Now? ) and Saudi Arabian Haifaa Al Mansour whose Wadjda attracted a lot of attention at the Venice Film Festival, the first feature written and directed by a Saudi Arabian woman. But there are so many more. Just the other day, Ana Lily Amirpour p

Muriel Rukeyser I'm more of a writer than an activist at the moment. Last week I finished the first draft of my play about Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), the poet and activist whose life, poems and other writings inspire me. It's set in a radio station in the present day and the two main characters are a radio host and her technician. Fellow poet Anne Sexton called Muriel Rukeyser 'beautiful Muriel, mother of everyone' and once I'd finished I could see the draft's connections to my long quest for a satisfying literary and artistic matrilineage. The draft's now with a reader and then there will be more drafts. I have a pile of other work to finish before year's end. And I haven't had time to organise my spring garden. So this post's a catchup of alphabetically-ordered info that I wish I could write full posts on. Kind of like a magazine, to dip into and out of! And for the next little while I'm likely to post less regularly and more about