Wellywood Woman

Yes, champions can come from anywhere. And New Zealander Niki Caro's a champ, director of McFarland USA . But she's the only woman director on the  Disney list for 2015 , which includes Pixar films. Furthermore, there's only one film on the list with a female protagonist, Pixar's Inside Out , an animation 'told from the perspective of the emotions inside the mind of a girl' and written and directed by men. This is no good for those of us who enjoy films by and about women and girls. But on this first day of 2015 – happy new year to all! – I'm delighted to celebrate a new film by Niki Caro, her first since A Heavenly Vintage (2009). McFarland USA is based on a true story about Jim White, a teacher (played by Kevin Costner) who noticed that young Latino farm workers ran great distances each day just to get from their exhausting jobs to school and back home. He creates a cross-country team and transforms the team into a state cham...

It's always exciting when a New Zealand woman-directed feature comes out. There's been a big gap between Dana Rotberg's White Lies/Tuakiri Huna , in early 2013, and Michelle Joy Lloyd's Sunday ,   which premiered last weekend. In what's believed to be a world first, in a carefully designed multiplatform release by Dustin Clare and Michelle as distributors (Fighting Noise),  Sunday opened simultaneously across more than twenty New Zealand cinemas, on television and the internet, on DVD and on airlines. Until now, Michelle was best known as producer of the internationally acclaimed Open Source film project Stray Cinema , which she founded in 2006 while living in Wellington. She produced and directed the first round of Stray Cinema film footage shot in London and screened at the first Stray Cinema screening event in London, 2007. Starring Dustin Clare and Camille Keenan, two award-winning Australasian actors, Sunday 's a relationship drama in the v...