Wellywood Woman

So Alison Maclean's  The Rehearsal will have its international premiere in New Zealand, at the New Zealand International Film Festival, in July. It goes on general release in New Zealand in late August and then off round the world, I hope. The Rehearsal  is Alison's  third and long-awaited feature. She also wrote the script, with Emily Perkins, from Booker Award-winning Eleanor Catton’s first novel. It is produced by her long-time collaborator  Bridget Ikin , with Trevor Haysom. “I wanted it to be an intimate, authentic experience of what it’s like to be a young person in New Zealand now,” said Alison, according to the festival’s announcement. Alison also made the classic Kitchen Sink, that debuted in Cannes in 1989 and won lots of awards. In the early 90s, after making her first feature, Crush, which played in Competition at Cannes, she disappeared to the northern hemisphere, where she made a second award-winning feature, Jesus’ Son ; and dire...

Jane Campion (photo Duncan Inns, courtesy Arts Foundation) It was a beautiful end to a beautiful week for New Zealand women writers. There’d been celebration all the way. One hundred and twenty-five years since Katherine Mansfield's birth (14 October). And on October 15 – in NZ or the UK – Ella Yelich-O'Connor (Lorde) and her co-writer Joel Little won New Zealand's most prestigious songwriting award, the APRA Silver Scroll , for Royals  – it was also Royals ' third week at no 1 on the US singles charts – writer/director Jane Campion was made an Arts Laureate by the New Zealand Arts Foundation – at last a formal New Zealand acknowledgment of her brilliance – and Eleanor Catton won the Man Booker Prize for  The Luminaries . ‘What do you have in your water there?’ someone emailed me from overseas, and that reminded me of a passage in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own– …it is time that the effect of discouragement on the mind of the artist should be measur...