Rouzie Hassanova & Annie Collins in Conversation

 

Rouzie Hassanova introduces her Radiogram (photo: Adrienne Martyn)

To mark the anniversary of the Christchurch massacre, on 15 March 2019, Green MP Jan Logie hosted a screening of Rouzie Hassanova’s Radiogram, organised by #directedbywomen #aotearoa.

It was just before New Zealand’s first Covid-19 lockdown, in March 2020.

We got together for a drink and a snack at Backbenchers, along with our lovely photographer Adrienne Martyn, and then crossed to Parliament’s Beehive theatrette. (Since then New Zealanders have become very familiar with this venue, where almost-daily Covid-19 press conferences are streamed, with the Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, other Ministers and the Legendary Dr Ashley Bloomfield.)

Lorna Kanavatoa welcomed us all in the voice of the mana whenua, Taranaki Te Ātiawa, and introduced Jan as ‘one of our local Porirua people who we’re so proud of having amongst us and who speaks on our behalf’.

Jan Logie speaks from the heart (photo: Adrienne Martyn)

When Jan spoke, she reminded us that before March 15 2019 ‘members of the Muslim community had been raising alarms for us for months and that they hadn’t been heard, about rising levels of hatred and violence that they were seeing’.

And she continued: ‘Radiogram is a film about a father who decides to walk almost 100 kilometres to the nearest town to buy a new radio for his rock and roll obsessed son. And the film celebrates the strength of the human spirit, family, friendship and the power of music, and is based on a true story from 1971, set in a predominantly Muslim community in Bulgaria under the communist regime, where religious expression and Western music are forbidden. And so there are many themes in this story that feel relevant today, about the human spirit and how we create communities and enable people to live free lives, for everyone within our communities’.

Jan also referred to why Radiogram hasn’t been seen more widely: ‘In 2016 there was research done that looked at all of the films across the world that have been distributed in any form. And only 16 percent of those were by women. Which is pretty shocking. But then, actually, those that made it to theatre release was only two percent. So gatherings like this are subversive. This is at some level, almost an underground railway for women’s film. And I think it is on all of us to to push for more opportunities for, and more pressure, for the diversity of stories to be told and to be told in the same range of places’ (1).

Rouzie then introduced Radiogram.

The Q &A

After the screening, Jan introduced Rouzie and legendary editor Annie Collins, there to question Rouzie. Rouzie’s young daughter Emily joined them at first and Cushla Parekowhai joined them at the end of their conversation, enriching the discussion with another dimension. Jan and Lorna then closed the evening.

Soundtech’s beautiful (unedited) recording of the event, which includes everything except the film and Lorna’s closing remarks, is here.

This is a lightly edited transcript of Jan’s post-screening introduction, Rouzie and Annie’s discussion and some of the audience questions at the end.

Jan Logie It’s an extraordinarily beautiful and moving film. [Applause.] And I’d like to welcome up Rouzie and Annie Collins... I think we can all, after sitting through that, understand why it’s won awards around the world and acknowledge what an incredible achievement that is, particularly as a first feature film and how lucky we are to have Rouzie living in New Zealand. [More applause.] … 

I’m really looking forward to the conversation between Rouzie and Annie Collins, who I suspect is known to most people in the room. But in case there’s somebody who isn’t as familiar with the film industry, Annie is one of New Zealand’s leading film editors who has edited I understand over 50 films, around 50 films. Maybe you haven’t done the adding up, but when when I was scanning through, it was a very, very long list, and of some very important films for us as a country, including the Poi E video which for me is personally very important. And [Merata Mita’s] Patu!. So I’m really looking forward to the dialogue between the two of them. 

And hopefully [Emily’s] face will cheer up when you get to sit next to your mum, because that was quite amazing, wasn’t it? Aren’t you proud of your mum? Yeah. So I welcome you up onto the stage. All of you.

Annie Collins, Rouzie, Emily (photo: Lorna Kanavatoa)

Annie Collins Thanks very much, Jan. [Emily joins the panel.] We thought we were going to have a third person on this panel anyway, so I think it’s just right. Kia ora tatou katoa. My feeling is that the introduction or the choice of this film on this day, after the Christchurch massacre commemorations is actually, for me, a perfect film. It’s… It is just the right film.

Rouzie Hassanova Thank you. I mean, for me, it’s very difficult to judge that because you know, it’s it’s what happened last year, it’s it’s it’s it’s horrible. It’s something that, you know you never want to see and you don’t want to experience and it’s you know, there’s nothing I can say. Thank you. And I didn’t know if a film is fitting to mark the anniversary because film is an expression, it’s an art, especially my version of the story is an expression of what I feel my granddad and my dad were going through at the time. I wasn’t alive at the time, so it was very…

You know, I had to consult myself with a lot of relatives and a lot of you know, friends and family and people in the village and, and from all different perspectives, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, because I didn’t want to offend anyone. I wanted to make a film that celebrated Muslim culture and introduced it in a very relatable kind of way. It was very important to me that I wanted to let people in and understand us rather than feel a distance from us. So when Jan, thank you for the invite and Marian mentioned that they wanted the film to be shown here to mark the anniversary my first reaction was no way a film can take anything away from what happened. But then I was encouraged that it is fitting because it allows people to understand. It allows people to relate and and and include and feel like they know the culture a little bit better after that.

Annie Collins Mm hmm. Bulgaria has a huge history to it, and do people here who haven’t been there know where Bulgaria is? (Laughs.) I had to Google to find it.

Rouzie Hassanova A lot of people do. Yeah, but we are north of Turkey. That’s the best way to describe it. And north of Turkey and Greece. And south of Romania, yeah. So we’re just all Balkans really. We’re all the same. I feel like… I’ve been to Turkey many times. I’ve been to Greece. I’ve been around most of the Balkans. And I feel like we’re one big family just living in different kinds of countries. The food is the same. The people seem to have the same customs and similar kind of understanding of life and everything. So I feel like we’re one big family. We just end up being in different countries.

Annie Collins Mm hmm. Because you’ve got about five countries surrounding you, haven’t you? And the Black Sea.

Rouzie Hassanova On west I mean, on east, sorry.

Annie Collins Yeah. And… (Laughs.)

Rouzie Hassanova It’s all very confusing.

Annie Collins And what that means it seems to me is that there is constant incursions into and shifting of borders and boundaries all through the centuries. And so the country is just continually…

Rouzie Hassanova It’s very hard because it’s on that route into Europe. So if you’re coming from the Middle East or immigrating from that region or even from Africa, you can still come through Turkey and Greece and Bulgaria. Sometimes it’s a good choice, but they usually choose to go from Macedonia and Serbia. And somehow that’s why I think the Balkans are [in a] very important position geographically because there’s so many people who have gone through. And that’s why Bulgarians are so different in terms of how we look, because it’s been taken over, empires after empires after empires. I mean, we were under the Ottoman Empire for five hundred years. So we’re very influenced by the Muslim community and the culture. But the Muslim community is a minority there. So it’s interesting and the same with Greece. But we’ve also been in the Roman Empire. I mean, so many empires have taken us over. So we are big mix of lots of nationalities and lots of colours and lots of heights and colours of hair and all sorts.

Annie Collins One of the things that really interests me within Radiogramis that there are quiet little essences of the things that people do when they colonise, when they take over another country. And one of them is spirit. You got to break the spirit of people. So you take the religion or you change the religion.

Rouzie Hassanova Yes. Yes. Yes. That’s the first that has to go yet. Yes.

Annie Collins And the thing about names. It’s so, so crucial. My dad who came out from Scotland had this little saying which I didn’t understand for decades, which was ‘It’s a wise child knows its own father’. Interesting. And your name is gone. Who are you?

Annie & Rouzie (photo: Adrienne Martyn)

Rouzie Hassanova Well, they knew that with Muslim religion the name is the one of the biggest and, you know, kind of things that if they take away, that really breaks them or breaks the unity within the community. Because in Muslim religion, this is what I know from my grandparents and my parents, if you change your name, then Allah on the other side when you die doesn’t know who you are. So you can’t be judged. You can’t be tried, as you say. So Allah would not know if you should go to heaven or hell, which means you’re stuck forever in the in-between.

And that’s the worst nightmare for Muslim people. They’d rather be in hell if they’d been, you know, bad people than in the middle, stuck forever, not knowing where they’re going. So the names, it had such a big importance, like bigger than losing your life. A lot of people lost their lives over the change of their names. The film could have been even more dramatic and so on, but I didn’t want to put such an emphasis on it because I wanted to make a film for a family audience and I wanted people to understand, not to be isolated or see it as some sort of propaganda or anything like that. So I was very, very careful how I portrayed that.

Annie Collins I understand that you did run into some trouble at some stage while you were filming, because some of the people around whom you were filming thought you were making propaganda.

Rouzie Hassanova Yes. Yeah. Of course, everyone’s open to having their own opinions. And for some people, probably it’s seen as a controversial film because it does reveal Muslim people as human. But this is why I wanted to make it. And we were doing a night shoot. And it was in one of the big scenes in the party secretary’s kind of office. And it was 2 o’clock in the morning, I think. The mayor of the village next door decided to come over and threaten us and tell us to stop shooting because they were against what we were doing: this film should never have been made. And because people were fearful of misrepresentation or, because what happened was during communism there were few stages of changing the names of the Muslim community.

So we started off from the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. And because there were quite a few people and they were doing it strategically one by one, by hiring their own people to do it. So they were smart about it.

But a lot of the Muslim community, because now, 60, 70 years later, a lot of the Muslim people have now converted back to Christian religion. So they’ve felt that I was trying to make a film now against them or shaming them, which wasn’t the case at all. So it was very difficult to try and explain that I wasn’t doing that. It was it’s actually a very family story. I’m keeping it close to my family because that’s what happened to them. And I wanted to show something that I’m very proud of, of my culture and my family.

Annie & Rouzie (photo Adrienne Martyn)

Annie Collins I think that’s one of the things which I feel about the film, is that it’s very authentic and you don’t get that authenticity unless you are a person of that culture, because the authenticity doesn’t come from the big stories and the big speeches, it comes from the tiny details of family life.

And only somebody who knows and comes from that culture actually understand which details are the important things that give you the clues.

Rouzie Hassanova I mean, that’s right. But I have to admit it took a lot of cast and crew encouragement because I feared that there will be a lot of backlash. I mean, I’ve experienced discrimination, racism myself. And so I was very scared. Even at financing stage we had a lot of people against the movie. They misread the script. There was a lot of things said in public that shouldn’t have been said. But we just tried to rise above it. But my producer [was] Gergana Dankova.

You know, it’s very difficult when you’re trying to make an authentic film and you’re a first time filmmaker and you’re a woman and everyone is looking at you and everyone is questioning you and saying, are you going to do something that will misrepresent my country or my people? And are you going to offend me? And then, you know, it took a lot of encouragement. I needed encouragement from the cast. And thank God they were with us on the journey because they were very dedicated. And being professional actors they they were the ones who inspired me to speak the dialect in the film.

Annie Collins So you had written in what language?

Rouzie Hassanova In a clear, a little literary, kind of Bulgarian, which is not the language they speak in the mountains. In the mountains they speak a bit of a mix of Turkish and Bulgarian. It’s kind of strange. Yeah.

Annie Collins So when did that change occur?

Rouzie Hassanova Two days before the shoot. (Laughter.) So this is what I’m saying: I didn’t have the guts to write it like that because it wouldn’t have gone through the financing process. I knew that and I didn’t have the guts to direct it like that. But it took the actors to say, “Hold on. Let’s do this right.” And I was like, “Yes, why am I not doing this right? Why am I even thinking about getting them to speak clean Bulgarian when they don’t in the mountains?”

Annie Collins So it’s like these two these two languages, there’s two versions of the script. There’s a script that the funders can read and give you money for.

Rouzie Hassanova Yeah.

Annie Collins And there’s a script that actually you shoot.

Rouzie Hassanova Yeah.

Annie Collins And in many ways they shouldn’t be the same script.

Rouzie Hassanova Well, in our situation, yes. And also it took us almost five years for the project to get the money from Bulgaria because of that problem. We had a lot of… We faced a lot of difficulty in getting the money. And the only reason why we got 100,000 euros from the Bulgarian National Film Centre is because there was money left in the budget in 2015. And we were the next project on the list that just about made it. And so they called my producer and they said, right, we can’t give you 700 that you wanted, but we can give you 100. Can you make it? And so then she called me and I said, “I think we can”. And so then we I called some friends in Turkey and I offered them the Turkish rights and I said, I need another 25 so we can actually shoot the movie, because that’s what we needed to actually go into production. And then that’s why it took us two years to finish editing because we had nothing left. So we had to do it as and when and favours. And… You know.

Annie Collins Yeah, I know. (Laughter.) So you actually had a co-production with Poland?

Rouzie Hassanova Yeah. That was just equipment.

Annie Collins So, just equipment for the shoot.

Rouzie Hassanova Yeah. So we had four Polish guys arrive in a massive truck with all the camera, lighting, sound. It was all given to us. Well we had it for free, but of course that was part of the co-production agreement is that they will come in. But it was great because obviously we do not have money for any of the equipment…

Annie Collins That’s pretty interesting that you you get a co-production with Poland.

Rouzie Hassanova It is very interesting because now they’re kind of going a little bit the other way. They’re becoming quite right and quite isolating to other cultures and religions. But, you know, we had we had the greatest luck of meeting these two producers that really liked the script and and the team behind really wanted to kind of be part of the experience and make something together, so…

Annie Collins I wanted to ask you a little bit more about the cast and directing them, etc., because for for me, the performances that are up on screen are faultless.

Rouzie Hassanova I see a lot of mistakes, but anyway…

Annie Collins That’s not just really great actors. You can direct great actors really badly and come up with a heap of what you don’t want. It’s also director.

Rouzie Hassanova Well. Thank you. I was very conscious that I wanted the actors to feel like they were one of the people in the village. So three days or four days before the shoot, I had them stay with some locals. And I had them separate, in different rooms. And I had them basically do exactly what the locals were doing, going to pick the tobacco, milking cows, scything the hay, you know, loading the trucks. You know, every single thing that is in the movie, they did it. And at first they were a little bit uncertain because in Bulgaria, they’ve never really done such an exercise before. But for me, it was very important that it looks authentic on screen. And they loved it. And maybe this is the reason why they then encouraged me to change the language because they spent that time. And they started seeing how easy it was, an important part of the life, how people spoke. So…

Annie Collins That’s a process that you put them through.

Rouzie Hassanova Yeah.

Annie Collins Which was quite unusual I take it, for going onto a film set.

Rouzie Hassanova It was, especially because we didn’t have any money. So it was unusual. They didn’t expect it. They felt out of comfort, their comfort zone, because these are guys…everyone in the movie is incredibly famous in Bulgaria. So they, they’re like stars. So they didn’t really expect any of that kind of living in someone’s house with basics like not even proper toilets, you know. And just kind of with the animals. But they loved it at the same time. They loved it because it was different.

Annie Collins Is your background from one of those sorts of villages?

Rouzie Hassanova Yeah, I’m basically one of those little girls that was in the tobacco fields. It’s the same village that I grew up. And that’s the house, we shot in the same house of my granddad. Everything in the movie is pretty much one to one with what I remember from back then.

Annie Collins More authenticity isn’t it?

Rouzie Hassanova Well, I was very proud. I remember being on the tobacco fields when I was four or five years old and it was so hot and I was so tired because we had to get up at 4 o’clock in the morning to go there really early. And, you know, when you’re a kid, you want to play. But I had to do all this work and I was praying for rain so I can just kind of sit and not do anything. But, you know, at the same time, I remember all the songs. I remember how people got together. And they were always some sort of…

Everything was connected with music in a funny way. We sang songs when we were happy and we sang songs when we were very sad. And so for me, it’s something that I grew up with and I really wanted to show to the whole of Bulgaria to see, because when I …when the summer was over, I was back at school and that was in the middle of Bulgaria. And my classmates didn’t know what I was up to. And and and I felt different, but I couldn’t really explain. So, yeah, I just basically wanted to tell everyone how proud I am of who I am. Yeah.

Annie Collins So if you come from a wee village, that village we saw, how on earth did you start making films? It’s not the easiest sort of thing to do.

Rouzie Hassanova Well, no. Well, so long story. But don’t know how to say it short. I applied when I was 18. I applied for a lot of universities. A lot of Bulgarian universities. International universities. Because I spoke English, I went to a special kind of course, to speak, to learn English and special school, to get really fluent. And I wanted, I really wanted to study, you know, a world class kind of education, to have that. But when an opportunity came that one university in London offered me a position, a place, I jumped at it because… my name is Muslim. So at the time, I felt that I didn’t have the same opportunities as my classmates if I stayed.

The option of leaving and trying somewhere else like the U.K. was amazing. And I felt instantly welcomed. And nobody cared. Nobody nobody cared about my name or the fact that I had a Muslim background. Everyone was like, just come and do this. And I now felt very included. I instantly found friends. And not that I didn’t have friends in Bulgaria. I did. But for my future, I felt that was the best opportunity because my family, you know, they were repressed. And so they pushed me out of the door, basically. And then film.

Film took a lot of time. I would say eight to nine years, but it’s something that I wanted to try. And I don’t know, I guess I’m a little bit crazy that I always make films even though I never have money, but it just started off with a short, going to university, which got a distinction. And then I got encouraged to keep going. And then I made another short out of my own. And then another one. And then another one. And then the feature took about nine years. So a long time.

Annie Collins Is it nine years for one film? I mean, it’s not unheard of here in this country either. But, so. (Laughter.). But it’s it’s it’s a huge patch of your life to put in to put into one thing but that you put into this film, that’s…

Rouzie Hassanova I mean, I, you know, when you start making something, you never think it’s going to take that long. You always think, Oh, we’ll make it. And it’s going to be straight out and it’s going to have a life, and so on. But I was really passionate about telling this movie, and there was a lot of people, of course, encouraging me to make it into a thriller, into an action. And and all sorts.

Annie Collins You need a car chase.

Rouzie Hassanova Yeah, I know. Next one. But it wasn’t the kind of film I wanted to make, actually. I was trying to stay very close to a Turkish director who is one of my biggest influences. And his name is Semih Kaplanoğlu. And so I was going for that kind of very poetic, but also like very authentic. And I wanted to basically show something that was real and not fake.

Annie Collins One of the things that just grabs me about Radiogram is a couple of things. It’s how you had figured out the essence of what information you want to seem to give. But the most important thing that you’ve figured is what emotion you want to give with the information. And that’s, that’s that’s a quality not many filmmakers have.

Annie & Rouzie (photo: Adrienne Martyn) 

Rouzie Hassanova Well, there were a few occasions that I can recall where, because of that, because I was a little bit obsessive about it. There were some some scenes that we reshot three times and there were some scenes that we did 17 takes. On one camera set up. So that’s obsessiveness, because I was so… I really did not want melodrama. And I didn’t want over the top performance. And sometimes the actors took ages to get into the rhythm. And of course, there’s a lot of other distractions, sometimes planes are flying above or someone’s phone rings and it’s Oh! And then I’ve got to reset and reset and… But that’s my passion. If I’m doing something, I want to do it right. And so I’ll keep trying until I get the best take. And and hopefully then someone like you can fix it if if I haven’t got it. (Laughter.)

But I must say, if it wasn’t for my editor, the film would have been completely different. So editors take a lot of credit for it. And I’ve worked. So I started working with a Polish editor at the beginning and it was very clear he just didn’t get the emotion that I was after. He cut the movie like a tele-feature. And I literally cried and I said, this is not the film I shot. And so then I, then we had to stop, because we had no money. And then suddenly I had to find a new editor. And I found this amazing lady, Natasha Westlake, in London, who we didn’t pay a lot. We did it over the weekends. I was heavily pregnant. But she got it. She got the music and the emotion and and we didn’t spend a lot of time, in fact, because I left her to do it.

Annie Collins Oo, that’s interesting.

Rouzie Hassanova But from then on, I knew. I knew. I knew that we’d got a movie. I knew that I did it OK. Like it wasn’t all lost.

Annie Collins And the interesting thing, eh, that that combination of people who do get it and then the film itself talks back to you and tells you it’s in the right hands and you don’t have to run around worrying about it so long as you just take your time and sit and look and listen at what’s going on.

Rouzie Hassanova And then being open to editors talking to you, because one third of the script is actually not even in the movie. So it was heavily edited. It was heavily edited in post.

Annie Collins I was going to ask you about it because the other thing that really grabs me about it is the sparseness of it. It’s almost shorthand in some ways, and it takes a lot of guts to cut a film like that. To leave off the bits and pieces where people walk indoors and outdoors and, you know, get themselves from one place to another and how did they get there and why are they doing that and all this sort of stuff? And people want to have it all explained, but actually, they don’t need it. Yes they’re in a truck. Somebody gave them a lift and they’re in a truck. They get there.

Rouzie Hassanova Well, that’s how that helps when you have an editor like Natasha, who was just exactly saying those things to me. She was like, you don’t need to explain it. Don’t worry about it. They will get it. Trust your film. Trust your vision. And and that constant kind of reminder was amazing because you do doubt yourself. You’ve written that script millions of times over and over and over. I could… I could recite every single word on it. And you see every single cut. And and so you you do see only the mistakes. You don’t see the good stuff. And so, yeah, it helps other people being there, encouraging you and helping you through the way.

Annie Collins Have you ever cut a film with that sort of sharpness before? With that brevity?

Rouzie Hassanova No, no. That was my first time, yeah.

Annie Collins Well, that must have been very exciting for you.

Rouzie Hassanova Yes, it was it was very challenging, but it was good. It was a good challenge, you know. It was very healthy. I learnt a lot.

Annie Collins Yes. It’s always the nice thing about working on a film isn’t it. It’s not just what you give to it. It’s what It’s what you get back.

Rouzie Hassanova Yeah.

Annie Collins Yeah. One thing that I have been thinking about because I’ve actually watched it twice in the last two days now and it’s a thing about when you’re from that place and you are you are pulling up these these details that give you the authenticity and really tell your story with that sort of brevity. Somewhere along the line, you actually have to know yourself. And you have to turn and look inside yourself.

Rouzie Hassanova I don’t know what you mean, but…

Annie Collins In order to know those things, you have to have really examined yourself.

Rouzie Hassanova Oh, yeah. And especially my family. I had to examine my family and that was not easy at all. And some hate me for it. But, you know, it’s, it’s interesting because even the family, it’s not… You know, in Muslim culture, we are quite humble or anyway, the Pomak people in the village in that kind of community, they’re very humble people.

So when it came to like premieres and events and speaking and stuff like that, they didn’t really want to be part of it. And and because they didn’t want the kind of how do you say, to draw attention. But, yeah, it was challenging to talk to them and to ask the hard questions so I could be truthful, especially because the bad guy Serahev, is a Pomak. He is like the Muslim guy that turned Christian, that then betrayed his own people. And that is something that you know, it happened. It was historically correct. But it’s not something people were easy to talk about. And weren’t happy to admit that they have people like that within them.

Annie Collins It’s a terrible exposure.

Rouzie Hassanova Yeah. Yeah.

Annie Collins Hard stuff. Hmmm. The sound work on it. It is a beautiful soundtrack on it, and I’m not just talking about the use of music. Music in itself is a simple element in many ways. It’s the knitting of the richness of the sound behind the music. It may be what I’m thinking of are actually composed elements.

Rouzie Hassanova They are. Yeah.

Annie Collins But the knitting of it altogether, it is a beautiful soundtrack. Who was doing the sound design? Was that Polish?

Rouzie Hassanova Well, again, we had a very similar experience with the sound when we had a Polish company start. And then I had to make a very difficult decision. And, you know, again, I just felt like I couldn’t find the right people to work with at the beginning. And that makes it really hard for producers, for me and for everyone involved and for the co-production, of course, that became slightly tricky towards the end because of it.

But they just, again, didn’t get the movie. The team in Poland, they added so much sound, so many effects that actually it was laughable. It felt like a farm movie and not a drama. And I just couldn’t believe it. And then and then I had to take that away from them and again, find a very amazing group of young, well, not young, young like me, I guess, but sound design guys that did it for very little money and they did the whole sound mix as well. So they were incredible. They did it in literally one month, but that’s working weekends because we didn’t have the money. So it was incredible. They recorded everything in their little tiny studio. They knew exactly what I wanted. And again, I hardly even went there because by then my daughter was born. So if I went, she had to come with me and all that.

Annie Collins I would have felt very, very torn if I was in that situation. Twice you’d had critical stages of the film totally misinterpreted. And then when you do get somebody who looks like they get it and can do it, you’re actually away. You leave it in their hands. I don’t know if I’d have the courage to do that.

Rouzie Hassanova Well, I mean, they give you a first cut. You have to allow an editor and you have to allow a sound team to have a go at it first. Otherwise, there’s no point if you’re gonna be there dictating, telling everyone what to do. So. You just know instantly when they give you the first version of their version of the film that they’ve seen, you just know. It’s like that that that easy.

Annie Collins So your process there was to just like put the footage in Natasha’s hands, perhaps the assembly that you’ve been given, and you said ‘Take it. See what you can do with it’.

Rouzie Hassanova Yeah. And give her two weeks and and then see the cut.

Annie Collins Come back and have a look.

Rouzie Hassanova Yeah. And then it’s like you either get it or you don’t. And you then start polishing, polishing, polishing it.

Annie Collins Yeah. Yeah. It’s quite a quite a… when creativity works it’s quite a loose business. How are we doing for time? Any questions from anybody?

audience question How was it received in Bulgaria?

Rouzie Hassanova So in Bulgaria, we had a small release because the cinemas didn’t want to book it on a wide release. We had it on 10 screens. It was released. I mean, critically by the reviewers and stuff like that it was received very well because they they understood what I was trying to say. But we released in the hottest weekend, so it was bad timing. But it’s done OK, I mean, for what it is for that kind of level of film. And, you know, it’s not for everybody. It’s not for the mass audience of Bulgaria. It did OK. And then it got released in Turkey. And I think it had a limited release in Poland as well.

audience question (inaudible, about scriptwriting)

Rouzie Hassanova Well, it’s interesting with this example, because now I’m trying to write something else and I’m definitely doing something. You know I have a very different kind of structure of writing. With this particular story because it was a short and then the Scripteast Development Lab heard about it because we were nominated for this award. And then they just heard about the pitch. They heard the pitch and they just came and met me.

And we had a very quick coffee and they said ‘This needs to be a feature’. And I just, I was a bit like, it can’t be. I don’t even know how to where to begin. And they said, ‘L’ook, we give you, we’ll extend the deadline for another two weeks if you can give us a feature film script. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s a development lab. Anyway, we’ll help you develop it. Just give us a script, 90 pages.’ (Laughter.) So, yeah.

So I took two weeks off my work and I sat down and… I didn’t even write a treatment. I just wrote the biggest probably pile of crap. But they just saw the potential of it and then accepted it. And it took about, well, it took eight years of development. A lot of drafts, 14 drafts. I mean, it took a lot of development labs. It took script editors. It took… We had financing for development from Media, [now called Creative Europe]. We went to EAVE, we went we went to so many events just to try and get as much feedback as possible. And I was very green in this writing process. But it was an incredible school.

Annie Collins And then you dropped a third of it.

Rouzie Hassanova And then I dropped a third of it. (Laughter.)

audience (inaudible question about New Zealand filmmaking)

Rouzie Hassanova Here is very different. (Laughter.) Number one. Europe is very crowded. It’s very competitive. You are up against thousands of film makers, super, super talented. And so, well, it’s just so much harder to get finance. Incredibly hard. Here I haven’t really started doing much. We’re just doing a little short now with Fran Carney over there, which we are prepping for a May shoot. And it’s a kind of cute little story set here in New Zealand about immigrants again. But so far, it’s been a completely different experience. It’s because everyone is so welcoming and and people are so happy to be helping and giving you advice and… or being involved in the project. It just feels, it literally feels like a breeze, to me anyway. You don’t have to beg and ask… I mean it just feels so much easier. But I’ll tell you, in a few months, if that changes. (Laughter.)

Cushla Parekowhai joins in (photo: Adrienne Martyn)

Lorna closes the evening (photo: Adrienne Martyn)

(1) Showtools provided this infographic re the New Zealand government’s 2015–2019 investment in large budget screen production: just 0.97% of almost $374m allocated to projects directed by women.