Wellywood Woman

Thanks to the Associate Minister for Arts, Culture & Heritage, Grant Robertson, and to Jan Logie, Under-Secretary, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Justice (Sexual and Domestic Violence Issues),  Minimum  screened in Parliament’s Beehive Theatrette during  last year’s #directedbywomen , following Kanya Stewart’s classic  Even Dogs Are Given Bones  (1982, for Dyke Productions and  Auckland Women’s Community Video ), about the women who occupied the Rixen clothing factory in Levin when the owner decided to close the factory but wouldn’t pay them redundancy. still from  Even Dogs Are Given Bones It was a beautiful thing when Grant Robertson introduced the evening and asked the  Even Dogs Are Given Bones  women  to stand up so we could applaud them. And beautiful to watch the two works — made almost 40 years apart — together; and to watch all the  Minimum  episodes at once, in a crowded cinema. As well as some o...

PQR = abbreviation for Pro Quote Regie /Pro Quote Film, advocating for equal allocation of public funding to women’s films You’re probably familiar with the questions that screenwriters often ask themselves when they revise their work: Do I start this scene as late as possible and end it in the right place? Who gets the last word in this this scene/sequence? Can I combine a couple of these characters? And you'll know that there are often more questions, starting at the very first draft and persisting right through a film’s release, about the genders of storytellers, whether there’s a female protagonist, how the women and girls are described, what they talk about to each other, how they act. There’s much more attention paid to how many women and girls appear onscreen and how often they speak. There are endless studies that you’re probably familiar with, too, from places like the Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film, San Diego State University , from ...

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...

Those women's marches were amazing. And so is the #womeninfilm movement, where women filmmakers' strategies for change are becoming ever more diverse and sophisticated. Writer/actor/producer Naomi McDougall Jones is one of the most thoughtful and energetic change agents around and Danielle Winston and the women of  Agnès Films (named in honor of Agnès Varda)  continue their own significant contributions with this excellent interview with her, copy-edited by Elena Chronick.  Warm thanks to them all.  Naomi McDougall Jones DW On a frosty January afternoon, I met with with writer/actress/producer, Naomi McDougall Jones. Our hangout, a little pie shop called Four & Twenty Blackbirds, was quirky enough to have been the backdrop for a  Gilmore Girls  scene if not for being around the corner from the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Gowanus Brooklyn. As we shared slices of buttery lemon blackout pie, Naomi, a self-possessed woman with crimson h...