Wellywood Woman

Pro Quote Regie  at the Berlinale The first part of this series delighted in the roar of the collective, global Activist Complex Female Protagonist who works to improve representation of women in front of and behind the camera. (It was a limited record because I can only access information in English and – sometimes – in French.) The second celebrated a recent surge in this protagonist's work, in Australia.   This post focuses on  gender equity in New Zealand feature film funding. Like other  European and British Commonwealth countries we have taxpayer-funded systems to support local screen production– feature filmmaking, short films, webseries, transmedia work and television. And like theirs, our  hard  data demonstrates that fewer producers apply for development and production funding of women-written and -directed features than for features that men write and direct.  One suggestion for New Zealand is that among other taxp...

Ava DuVernay and her Independent Spirit Award I'm a huge Ava DuVernay fan. A feature film and television director, writer, producer and distributor, founder of the African American Film Festival Releasing Movement (AFFRM), she also makes branded entertainment. She won the Best Director Award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival for her second feature film Middle of Nowhere , and was honoured with the 2013 John Cassavetes Independent Spirit Award and the Tribeca Film Institute 2013 Affinity Award. I think of Ava DuVernay as a visionary, from whom all filmmakers can learn. Take AFFRM for example, a distribution collective of black arts organizations dedicated to quality black independent films. Is this a model that could work for women's independent films, too? And what about her smart approach to branded entertainment? If we're concerned with the way women are represented, and the compromises of 'commercial' work, what can we learn from her work for Miu Miu a...

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...

I. I’ve been finishing Mouse , my first short comic, and am researching/writing a play. Being quiet. And it takes a lot to get me out of the house before 2pm. But last week was Writers & Readers week here in Wellington. Part of the big New Zealand International Arts Festival. So I went to sessions I thought would help my work. A Bill Manhire poetry masterclass to enhance my research. A genre session where Denise Mina talked about the way (writing) comics exercises both sides of her brain and about a list of ‘rules’ that includes one about using only 40 words per panel. And a session on “Why is Theatre Not Dead Yet?” with local playwrights Dave Armstrong and Ken Duncum and with Englishman Robert Shearman, probably best known as a playwright who also wrote for Dr Who . They were very warm and funny and informative and I loved it. And then came the Q & A. This is how poet Bill Nelson reported the element that concerns me, in a sharp little review-as-script—the story of a wo...

Women Make Movies (WMM) is unique, as a film distributor, as a supporter of women filmmakers and as an activist institution. Forty years old this year, founded in New York around the same time as Ms magazine and Heresies, a women's art collective which produced an influential magazine. Although WMM has changed over the years, feminists have always retained ownership. Unlike Heresies, it's kept going as an organisation. WMM is central to many discussions of women's filmmaking around the globe. And during a conversation with an Asia-based filmmaker trying to find distribution for her feature, I realised that there were things I didn't know about WMM. So I asked Debra Zimmerman, the Executive Director, if I could interview her. Click here to listen Debra's worked for WMM for thirty years. I think she and the organisation are global treasures for women, with an astonishing record, astonishing reach, and extraordinary knowledge base. And it was lovely to see that ...

Women's films have done wonderfully well in the Sundance Awards. Ava DuVernay has just won the Directing Award for United States Film: Dramatic, with her second feature in two years, Middle of Nowhere . She's the first African-American woman ever to win this award.   Lauren Greenwood won the Directing Award for United States Film: Documentary, with The Queen of Versailles. Alison Klayman 's Ai Wewei: Never Sorry won a Special Jury Prize . Maria White won the Short Film Audience Award with The Debutante Hunters.  The Finally, the World Cinema Screenwriting Award went to  Young and Wild , available on MUBI and directed by Marialy Rivas (Chile), who co-wrote the screenplay with Camila Gutierrez and two men. Lucy Walker had already won the Jury Prize in Short Film Non-Fiction  The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom  (and is also an Oscar nominee). Blerta Zeqiri's  The Return/Kthimi  won the Jury Prize in Short Film, International Fiction, and...

Karin Chien Karin Chien is a producer and distributor based in New York. She’s produced ten films to date . In 2010 she won the Piaget Producers Award which honors emerging producers who, despite highly limited resources, demonstrate the creativity, tenacity, and vision required to produce quality, independent films. Karin’s most recently released film is Circumstance , written and directed by Maryam Keshavarz, who also produced, with Karin and Melissa Lee. Circumstance won the Audience Award at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and has just been nominated for the John Cassavetes Award (for films made under $500,000) at the Independent Spirit Awards. In post-production Karin has Bradley Rust Gray’s Jack and Diane about two girls who fall in love, and Patricia Benoit’s Stones in the Sun , about exile from Haiti. Karin is also the founder and president of dGenerate Films . dGenerate Films distributes films from the ‘digital generation’ of Chinese cinema, the current generation of...

lisa gornick   the round table Limping my way towards questions that will help validate a market for films about women, I fell over the United States release of the comedy Bridesmaids . Written by Anne Mumolo and Kristen Wiig, directed by a guy, and produced by Judd Apatow. In an article in the Huffington Post , Jamie Denbo expressed concern about the consequences if Bridesmaids doesn’t do well, for the writers, directors and actors that she refers to as …every creative, brilliant, funny woman in Hollywood [who] is (unfairly) being held hostage to a single film's opening weekend box office. Meaning no studio is likely to take any sort of chance on any new projects perceived to be ‘female driven comedy’ unless they have proof that it can perform. And perform well . I know that I’m now concentrating on films about women, and here I’ve strayed back into the territory of women writers and (maybe) directors. But I think that one of the issues about audiences for films about women...