Wellywood Woman

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...

The future of indie film culture is not corporate, but artist controlled. It is about owning your work and connecting with your audience— Ted Hope As well as emails and the phone—though I avoid my mobile—I can now blog and use Twitter and Facebook and the Development-the-movie website. And today I’m thinking about how each has a different function for me, and for Development . The website’s relatively fixed. It’s hard information, presented as simply as possible. Facebook’s an ongoing visual diary for Development -the-movie, where we can chat & make new friends. (You’re welcome to join us: just press the button in the right hand column.) This blog’s where—helped by emails and comments from friends and strangers—I sometimes try to make sense of the world that I care most about: Wellywood where I live and work, my garden, women filmmakers and writers, and Development . On Twitter, I keep up with the global issues: film (especially indie film), piracy & crowd funding, feminist a...

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...

I love this drawing from Lisa Gornick, accompanying her post on Starting on feature film number 4 . Today I printed out the "Development" script for (I think) the first time since May, when I started writing the other parts of my thesis. One copy for a woman I will visit tomorrow, hoping she'll agree to play Iris, hoping she's old enough to play Iris. The other for Rebecca, who's working on our Facebook page. And I saw a dreadful typo. I saw lines I wanted to delete IMMEDIATELY. AAAAGH. So Lisa's image is timely. It reminds me of the pleasures in that heft of pages. And that I need to start work on the next draft, always very scary and exciting after leaving it for a while. To hold the pages and let them calm my mind, enter that world again. Thanks, Lisa.

I can't wait to read this new book. It will arrive in the mail very soon. And there's a Facebook page associated with it where—according to Sophie Mayer one of the editors— "we're going to try and gather and share lots of news and ideas about women's cinema and visual media":  (see her comment a couple of posts down, & the link to her site on the sidebar to the right here). Here's what the publishers say about the book: Following in the footsteps of the filmmakers whose work it features —including Miranda July, Janie Geiser, Tracey Moffatt, Sally Potter, Cindy Sherman, Samira Makhmalbaf, Sadie Benning, Agnès Varda, Kim Longinotto, and Michelle Citron— T here She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond seeks to make trouble not only in the archives but also at the boundaries between artistic, industrial, political, critical, and disciplinary practices. Editors Corinn Columpar and Sophie Mayer have assembled scholarship that responds to women’s wo...

Here's Gaylene Preston on Screen Talk, talking about her life as a filmmaker. I think she's probably made more films—nearly forty—than any other New Zealander, an amazing mixture of features and docos. Gaylene has often made, as she says in the interview, "some of the invisible things visible", and those invisible things have often been about women's lives. And she's been very supportive of many women—as well as men—so it's not surprising that she says in this interview "There are still less women working in all sorts of areas in filmmaking than I would have hoped then (in the 70s)". I've had experience of Gaylene's generous support myself. She took me to Films de Femmes in Creteil (Paris) one year. And more recently when we met by chance she explained in great detail how I could use the Screen Production Incentive Fund , sketching out the details on one of the cafe's paper serviettes. I smile every time I see it floating in a file,...

Playwright and screenwriter Andrew Bovell ( Lantana , Blessed —directed by Ana Kokkinos, an interview with her here —and the forthcoming Edge of Darkness ) visited the Institute of Modern Letters the other day, a great place for treats-for-students. In a workshop, Andrew Bovell suggested that it's useful to look at what a main character first says and first does in a screenplay, and then at what she says and does at the end. "Is there a reversal, or a question answered?" If so, the writer’s done her job. And because I’d just finished my thesis, I wondered whether Andrew Bovell’s question would be useful there, too. In the thesis' Introduction, I described the evidence that shows a general problem—in New Zealand, it's more difficult for women to tell their stories as feature films than it is for men: From January 2003-December 2008, New Zealanders working in New Zealand produced at least seventy-five feature films. Women wrote and directed nine percent. The nati...

While I finished my thesis I didn't do much else for a few months. 404 unopened emails in one account, 791 in the other. And then I was done. And I discovered a short&sharp tweet from MadamaAmbi , sent back in June, in response to my Reading Women's Scripts post: "@devt internalized misogyny?" Then a comment I treasure, also in response to Reading Women's Scripts , from lisa gornick, the filmmaker whose film drawing site I love. Here's her latest drawing, girl at six : Lisa wrote: this is such hard but vital reading. it's like hearing your own mother be mean about you or something like that. it's so sad too. this is a great thing to air, to debate and for everyone not to be scared of discussing. there is probably some deep seated female self hating going on that causes all this to happen in an aggressive macho world of filmmaking and that with some quiet exploration and revelation we could unpick this and a new era of filmmaking could be born. 
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Another New Zealand feature with a woman director! This time, Rosemary Riddell. I love this project's blog, The Interminable Moon , from the writer/producer, Mike Riddell, who takes the reader through his amazing journey to get his story made. Shooting starts next month.

Between this, outside the window in July— —& this today (still no blue sky) I finished my PhD: "Opening space for New Zealand women’s participation in scriptwriting for feature films?" Hard yakka. But done.