Wellywood Woman

Sima Urale receives the Burr/Tatham Trust Award Just announced! Three celebrated screen storytellers have been awarded prestigious arts laureateships from the Aotearoa New Zealand Arts Foundation. Here they are! Sima Urale Filmmaker  Sima Urale  is influenced by her Samoan heritage and her experience of living in urban New Zealand. Her films include  O Tamaiti ,  Still Life ,  Coffee and Allah  and  Apron Strings . This year, she won the New Zealand Film Commission’s annual gender scholarship for Pacific Island screenwriters, with a sample script from her feature film,  Solo , which  according to the assessors  “is breathtaking in its fine detail and slow build-up of nuanced tension. The work of an expert screenwriter at the height of her powers. The voice is original and authentic with detail that can only come from lived experience.”  Sima started her career as an actor, quickly realised she wanted to write and create her own work and credits her distinctive aesthet

Shuchi Kothari Shuchi Kothari is a filmmaker and academic, based at the University of Auckland, where she where she convenes the Screen Production programme. She’s written three short films:  Fleeting Beauty ;  Coffee and Allah; and  Clean Linen ; and two features:  Firaaq  with Nandita Das, who also directed; and  Apron Strings,  with Dianne Taylor, directed by Sima Urale. Shuchi was co-creator of  A Thousand Apologies,  New Zealand’s first prime-time Asian series; and was the writer and presenter of  The Taste of Place: Stories of Food and Longing . Shuchi is also a producer of most of these projects; and one of the founders of the  Pan-Asian Screen Collective . I interviewed her late in 2018, after the first short she’s written and directed,  Shit One Carries , opened at the New Zealand International Film Festival (NZIFF). Marian  How did you feel about  Shit One Carries  opening at the New Zealand International Film Festival? Shit One Carries  still