Wellywood Woman

The first Emerging Women Filmmakers Network meet-up:  Lucy (l) and Lorraine (r), in front Thanks to Lucy Holyoake and Lorraine Hughes, Wellington has a new and shiny Emerging Women Filmmaker’s Network. It began with a meet-up late last month, attended by about 50 women. Lucy majored in Film at Victoria, where she did the practical courses, directed her first short documentary and fell in love with writing and directing. She’s now completing her Graduate Diploma in Media Studies where she’s researched and written about gender in film and media and she was happy to answer a few questions. What inspired your initiative? How did you establish the parameters of who the group is for? The idea of this group combines my passions for film and gender studies. Initially we opened it up to all woman of any skill level, but we quickly realised the gap we wanted to fill was for young or emerging women lacking experience. Being recent graduates ourselves, we both found it very hard...

It's time to register for Aotearoa New Zealand's HP48Hours (48Hours) film competition, founded by Ant Timpson in 2003 and supported by the New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC), our taxpayer-funded film organisation. So here's my view of the competition, an interview with veteran participant Ruth Korver and an analysis of director participation in 2016, by gender. I've been curious about 48Hours since 2006, when I started my PhD on the development of women's feature films in New Zealand. What, I wondered back then, are the roles of film initiatives created outside the NZFC? How do they feed into women's opportunities to make taxpayer-funded feature films? How do the NZFC's contributions – if any – to these initiatives benefit women writers and directors who want to make features? Whenever I've thought about how 48Hours benefits women who want to write and direct features, I've decided “Yes and No”. In 2009, for instance, I wrote “...o...

Every so often magic happens. Like this public meeting organised by  Directors & Editors Guild of New Zealand  (DEGNZ) and WIFTNZ . I was sad I couldn't go and look forward to seeing the video that was recorded, as shown in the audience pic below. Many thanks to DEGNZ Executive Director Fiona Copland and to Lucy Stonex, for this brief report of the historic event, including the pics, followed by my response. For those of you not familiar with New Zealand, Annie Goldson is a documentary director and producer and academic, Cushla Dillon is an editor, Gaylene Preston is a director, writer and producer in film and television and Jackie Van Beek is an actor and a writer and director for stage and screen. l. to r. Gaylene Preston, Kim Hill, Annie Goldson, Jackie Van Beek by Lucy Stonex Responding to the release of some concerning international statistics, members of DEGNZ and WIFT gathered in Auckland last week to talk about gender imbalance amongst dire...

This is an historic weekend for New Zealand cinema. Three New Zealand feature films have opened in cinemas to great reviews. And as far as I know the New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC), our state funder, did not invest in the development or production of any of them, although I understand that it contributed to post-production costs for two. There’s Operation 8 , directed by Abi King-Jones and Errol Wright: There's   Hook Line & Sinker , directed by Andrea Bosshard and Shane Loader: And there's Stephen Kang’s Desert , which premiered at the Pusan International Film Festival last year: (And Stephen Kang’s short Blue , also independently made, has been selected in Competition at Cannes, for La Semaine de la Critique). Exciting times. But they’ve been coming for a while, and they reflect exciting times in global cinema. Feature films developed and produced outside the NZFC have well outnumbered those made with NZFC support for some years now, and it was inevi...