Wellywood Woman

Guetty Felin on the set of ‘Ayiti Mon Amour’, with Anisia Uzeyman Women directed 25 of the 92 films i n contention for the Foreign Language Oscar in 2018 (27%), those submitted by Afghanistan, Argentina, Armenia, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Croatia, Ecuador, Georgia, Haiti, Hungary, Iran, Laos, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, Palestine, Panama, Paraguay, Poland, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand. This is an all-time record. There are also six LGBTQ-related films, from Chile, Finland, France, Norway, South Africa and Taiwan. Guetty Felin’s Ayiti Mon Amour is a magical-realist film that centres on a young man, Orphée, who mourns his father’s death in the 7.0 earthquake of 2010. It is Haiti’s very first submission for the Foreign Language Oscar and Guetty is the first Haitian-born female director ever to have shot a narrative feature entirely in Haiti. She’d earlier made a post-earthquake feature documentary called Broken Stones . Here in AotearoaNZ, we l...

So what else will I go to in the New Zealand International Film Festival , for sure (along with the Animation For Kids programme and the twelve animated films in Animation Now 2009 , selected from a gob-smacking 2,300 entries)? Some years I get too many tickets and the rush to the next film gets in the way of absorbing the last one. Amazing that the festival starts in Auckland 9 July and travels round. Then ends in Whangarei 25 November. Do tourists come here for it, I wonder. I'll be there for The Strength of Water written by Briar Grace-Smith—until now best known as as a playwright—and directed by Armagan Ballantyne. I've been waiting for a film written by a Maori woman since Once Were Warriors (1994) written by Riwia Brown. I think we need lots of them. There's a group of Barry Barclay films in the festival, and I'm remembering what he wrote, ages ago: “We shall get to know what a Maori film is when we get a chance to make more films”. Just as we'll know more...

A great roundup article here , by Sophie Ivan. Tx Little White Lies; Truth & Movies. She also wrote about a Birds Eye View panel of women filmmakers. Tx Birds Eye View. And there's another article here , by Abigail Tartellin. Tx Women & Hollywood. And finally, a couple of articles about a party given by documentary director Angela Ismailos. She has just made Great Directors , and included two women among the nine directors she interviewed: Agnes Varda and Catherine Breillat. I liked these articles because both writers talk with/about Catherine Breillat. I have a very beautiful poster for her Sex is Comedy in my hall, right opposite one for Agnes Varda's The Gleaners & I. I've read and been told that women writers and directors are represented much more strongly in France than elsewhere, and I can't remember reading anything a French woman has said about sexism in their industry. So I heard Catherine Breillat's voice like a tiny exciting whisper, and l...

Yes, the interview's in French & I struggle to understand some of it, but Agnes Varda's eighty year old joie de vivre inspires me and reminds me that filmmaking is fun. And —what a treat—her latest film, The Beaches of Agnes, is coming to the New Zealand International Film Festivals , traveling the country from July 10-November 26, here in Wellywood from July 18-August 3. NZFF director Bill Gosden writes: Agnès Varda was the lone female amongst the New Wave directors who shook up French cinema and helped set the agenda for the cultural revolution in the 60s. At almost 80 she has created a playfully idiosyncratic memoir of her sentimental education and life as an artist. Responding eagerly to the possibilities offered by digital technology, she sets up tableaux that recall her earlier work and places herself within her old photographs and extracts from her films ( Vagabond , The Gleaners and I and many more). She revisits old haunts to reminisce fondly with collaborators s...