Wellywood Woman

The Aotearoa New Zealand film and television world is being transformed by awareness of, and increasing commitment to, gender equity. Here are some lovely little things I’ve cherished since my last update. Michelle Latimer 1 The Māoriland Film Festival in Ōtaki (a beautiful small-town-by-the sea, north of Wellington)  has announced its first three awards and released its stats. The awards are all People’s Choice awards and films directed by women won two of them. Michelle Latimer’s RISE: Standing Rock was Best Documentary feature, from a docuseries that investigates the ongoing environmental rights struggles that continue to be faced by Native American and indigenous citizens. The episodes played at Māoriland, Sacred Water and Red Power , are situated at Standing Rock. Amie Batalibasi won Best Short for Blackbird , which tells the story of Solomon Islander siblings, Rosa and Kiko, who were kidnapped from their island home to work on a sugar cane plantation in Qu...

I'm delighted that Jane Campion's now Dame Jane . Here are my other local highlights from 2015. What have I missed? Those who spoke out in support of gender equity in allocation of film funding Karin Williams, Briar Grace-Smith, Libby Hakaraia, Chelsea Winstanley at the Big Screen Symposium (photo: @multinesia on tumblr) This is undoubtedly the highlight of my ten years' thinking and writing about this issue, as well as of 2015. First, at the annual Big Screen Symposium, producer/director    Chelsea Winstanley made  unequivocal statements  about the need for gender equity in  New Zealand Film Commission's allocation of taxpayer funding. Huge respect to Chelsea, the first high-flying New Zealand woman director/ producer to speak up publicly and staunchly on this issue, except for Dame Jane. May others join her in 2016. Then two men directors spoke out, writer/director Jonathan King and actor/writer/director Jemaine Clement...

Yes, champions can come from anywhere. And New Zealander Niki Caro's a champ, director of McFarland USA . But she's the only woman director on the  Disney list for 2015 , which includes Pixar films. Furthermore, there's only one film on the list with a female protagonist, Pixar's Inside Out , an animation 'told from the perspective of the emotions inside the mind of a girl' and written and directed by men. This is no good for those of us who enjoy films by and about women and girls. But on this first day of 2015 – happy new year to all! – I'm delighted to celebrate a new film by Niki Caro, her first since A Heavenly Vintage (2009). McFarland USA is based on a true story about Jim White, a teacher (played by Kevin Costner) who noticed that young Latino farm workers ran great distances each day just to get from their exhausting jobs to school and back home. He creates a cross-country team and transforms the team into a state cham...

To stay focused when I'm writing intensively, I go to the movies in the afternoons. It's a kind of meditation that includes the walk down the hill to the cinema and back up again afterwards. And a few weeks ago, I saw three women-directed movies in three days: Rama Burshtein's Fill The Void , Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette's Inch'Allah and Nicole Holofcener's Enough Said . Maybe things have changed, I thought to myself, ever optimistic. But I also noticed that men wrote and directed Catching Fire , from a novel by a woman, about a young woman and produced by a woman . And then I read Vocativ's  analysis of 2013's 50 top-grossing US releases . This shows that almost half were Bechdel Test-passing films and that they did better at the US box office than those that weren't. BUT except for Frozen , which Jennifer Lee co-directed (and wrote) men directed all 50. And then at the weekend, all three of the new releases reviewed in our local paper (with enthusiasm...

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...

I couldn’t believe my luck. For ages, I’ve wanted to learn about women in Asia who write and direct feature films. But with my limited language skills and networks I could’t easily access relevant information. I'd had a single conversation (five years ago) with a woman involved with the International Women's Film Festival in Korea , and that was it. And now, here was a Japanese woman, ‘ramuyaman’, on Twitter-- Ramuyaman had seen this ScreenTalk interview with Niki Caro: And then she sent out a general tweet: I'd like to see the film The Vintner's Luck directed by Niki Caro but unfortunately, it's not yet released here in TOKYO... Opportunistic as ever, I—as 'devt'—tweeted her. Was she a filmmaker who could tell me about Japanese women’s experience of feature filmmaking? Ramuyaman replied: @devt I'm a cinephile and fan of Niki Caro. North Country told me a lot about human rights. Whale Rider , unforgettable. I told ramuyaman I was writing about The Vin...

Last night at Park Road Post, a big crowd for the WIFT-organised showing of The Vintner's Luck (opening tomorrow) and a Q&A with Niki Caro. Tonight, two events, one after the other. First, a discussion of the cinematic, at the New Zealand Film Archive: Here's what organiser Script to Screen says about this event: Scripts are often rejected or critiqued on the basis that they are not ‘cinematic’, and are therefore unworthy of the big screen. But to writers the term is often unclear, meaning different things to different people. Is the term merely used as a weapon by arbiters of taste, or a catch all for any number of perceived deficiencies, or is it a way of defining the appropriate medium for a story? Scriptwriter and teacher Ken Duncum will lead a rigorous discussion with producer John Barnett ( Whale Rider , Sione’s Wedding), NZFC Head of Development Marilyn Milgrom and scriptwriter Graeme Tetley ( Out of the Blue , Vigi l) about what they believe are the defining eleme...