Wellywood Woman

I didn't analyse the Make My Movie entries this year, to check out how many women participated. But four out of twelve finalists are written by women and a fifth is written jointly by a woman and a man. Warm congratulations to all these finalists, listed alphabetically by project. You can vote for a project by clicking on the link provided. Please do vote for the projects you like the look of, because the prize is a $200,000 cash grant from the New Zealand Film Commission and Darksky Films/MPI Pictures – if you vote, we could have a new feature from a woman quite soon! The Card Game Written By Kathryn Akuhata-Brown A stranger joins a small town poker game and sets about winning everything from the players until they have nothing left to gamble but their children. A  Kathryn Akuhata-Brown  Film
 Collision Written By Maile Daugherty At 2am, on a pitch-black country road, a car is involved in a violent full-speed head-on collision. As ambulance, police

The networks of women working for change in the film world are growing all the time. And they're making powerful connections across borders. From now, from time to time I'll cross-post writing from other activists . Today's article from Maria Giese of Women Directors Navigating the Hollywood Boys Club seems a fine place to start: many of the myths she identifies are alive and well all over the world. drawing: Daniel Dejean By Maria Giese , of Women Directors Navigating the Hollywood Boys Club 1. The number of women directors is so small because women are not really interested in directing and few women are exceptional enough to do a man’s job. Right, so 3,500 women DGA members pay their union dues just for the hell of it! Believe us—we ARE interested! 2. The ratio of women directors is improving—it’s just going to take time. The ratio hasn’t changed significantly since the advent of cinema 100 years ago. How much more time shall we plan on waiting? 3

Jane Campion (photo Duncan Inns, courtesy Arts Foundation) It was a beautiful end to a beautiful week for New Zealand women writers. There’d been celebration all the way. One hundred and twenty-five years since Katherine Mansfield's birth (14 October). And on October 15 – in NZ or the UK – Ella Yelich-O'Connor (Lorde) and her co-writer Joel Little won New Zealand's most prestigious songwriting award, the APRA Silver Scroll , for Royals  – it was also Royals ' third week at no 1 on the US singles charts – writer/director Jane Campion was made an Arts Laureate by the New Zealand Arts Foundation – at last a formal New Zealand acknowledgment of her brilliance – and Eleanor Catton won the Man Booker Prize for  The Luminaries . ‘What do you have in your water there?’ someone emailed me from overseas, and that reminded me of a passage in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own– …it is time that the effect of discouragement on the mind of the artist should be measur

l.-r. Veronique Cayla, Najat Vallaud Belkacem, Aurélie Filippetti, Frédérique Bredin;  Bérénice Vincent at back It was a beautiful day. Screen Daily reported that France has launched a five-point gender equality charter for its film industry, put together by  Le Deuxième Regard , a Paris-based ‘lobby’ (read ‘activist’) group founded by Bérénice Vincent, Delphyne Besse and Julie Billy, who will circulate it for signature, to all segments of the industry. As you can see in the photo, all the first signatories of the charter were women, powerful women: Veronique Cayla, the head of  Arte France  the public television channel and Le Deuxième Regard's marraine, or 'godmother'; Najat Vallaud Belkacem, the Women’s Rights Minister; Aurélie Filippetti, the Culture and Communications Minister;   Frédérique Bredin, president of the  Centre National du Cinéma et de l'Image Animée (CNC)  – the state film funding body. It remains to be seen who else will sign the charter. T

A record 76 countries submitted films to the Academy Awards Foreign Language category. Attached to these films are 79 directors, 17 of them women. That's 21.5%, which I believe is at the higher end of the proportion of feature films directed by women, globally . The three women in this list who are joint directors all share that credit with men. (WHY are there so rarely women who co-direct?).Any guesses about which of these will be among the few actually nominated? Or might win? I suspect that in this context Haifaa al-Mansour's  Wadjda  will be up there. I've seen so few of these films though. There's a fine opportunity for an enterprising person to set up an online festival (hello Indiereign , hello MUBI ) , so we can all share the delights of the very diverse directors' achievements! Images of the directors are on my Pinterest board, Oscars 2014 Women Directors . Hoping this board will flourish over the next few months-- Here's the list: