Wellywood Woman

Maria Giese Maria Giese, a director and a member of the powerful Directors Guild of America (DGA), spoke out about discrimination against women directors in Hollywood long before the those interviewed by Maureen Dowd for a major  New York Times article , published a couple of weeks ago – in interviews, through articles on her blog and in other social media. Like Lexi Alexander , Maria is a hero. She began challenging the DGA back in 2011and in 2013 moved on to ask the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California to investigate discrimination against women directors. The ACLU set up a webpage,  Tell Us Your Story , where it issued a warm invitation– If you are a director who has been discriminated against, excluded from directing jobs in television or get less TV work than your male peers, we’d love to hear your story to learn more about the experiences of women in the directing industry. Please tell us your story below. Women ...

Get Your Hopes Up (Ballance St Wellington) photo: Phantom Billstickers I'm at the bus-stop. Feeling gloomy. Ages ago I agreed to write about New Zealand women screenwriters, for an international guide. And now the deadline's looming and I've lost interest. In the eight years of my Development project , nothing has changed in New Zealand. Creative New Zealand and the New Zealand Film Commission, the organisations that distribute public funds to filmmakers and other artists, have no gender policy. They don't record gender statistics consistently. And they never publish them. Nor does New Zealand On Air, which funds some movies for television, and is required to consider women as an audience. The film guilds – publicly funded – don't make diversity statements or produce diversity reports. And change is slow everywhere. Callie Khouri knows what she's talking about, from a career that stretches from Thelma and Louise to Nashville . She said the other...

There was a panel called 'Directing the Dead 2' today, at the South by Southwest Film Festival (SXSW). It included Scott Weinberg, James Wan, Simon Rumley, Ben Wheatley, Jason Eisener, Nicolas Goldbart. And one woman, Emily Hagins. And WHAT a woman she is. Emily Hagins is 18 and has made three features. My Sucky Teen Romance is premiering today at SXSW ('today' around the world goes on rather a long time, as you know). Anyway, I was up early, and fell across a live twitter feed from Scott Macaulay, @FilmmakerMag. And laughed, several times. I loved it that Scott's few tweets managed immediately to capture/attract so many of the different points of view about a complex issue. What a great way to start the day, some light relief from the real-life horror stories of Japan. (I can't get this image out of my head, dream about it. Long to help. Hope that over time there will be plenty of opportunities to do so.) Japanese tsunami March 2011 (from Stuff ) I e...