Wellywood Woman

This is the year for the female mavericks to get the same treatment as their brothers *  In New Zealand there’s a new competition for feature films, called Make My Movie . The winner receives $100,000 and makes a movie. As a first step, participants submitted posters for their movies online, with a synopsis, and filled in a few more details, some in relation to the participants’ track records, from memory. One detail requested was ‘age’, which I questioned. The competition needed to know that entrants were over 18, but because of the potential for age discrimination it seemed more appropriate to ask entrants to state that they were over 18.** Twelve finalists were selected, from around 750. Anyway, I became interested when I saw that the project's writer's name was the only personal name that appeared online with each submission. Aha, I thought, what a great way to find out more about the range of New Zealand women screenwriters. How many are there? So I started at th...

Five docos that women directed or co-directed are among the fifteen films short-listed for the Documentary Feature category of the 2012 Academy Awards. Warm congratulations to all these women!

We have lovely neighbours. Madeline McNamara is one of them. A writer, director, actor. Her current gig, for Voice Arts Trust , is At Circle’s End: The Drama of Death from Diverse Perspectives . Part of the Death and Diversity programme at Museum of Wellington City and Sea, At Circle’s End explores death and dying, grief, mourning and lamentation, in a celebration of diversity and sameness, and of life. And to create this unique production, Madeline’s worked with a group of strangers, diverse in culture, faith, age and performance experience. There will be six 40-minute performances only:
 7pm Friday 18 November 3pm Saturday 19 November 3pm Sunday 20 November 7pm Friday 25 November 3pm Saturday 26 November 3pm Sunday 27 November. Entry is by koha/donation. Limited seating, booking is essential: call 472 8904. If you saw Madeline’s Demeter’s Dark Ride (nominated for Most Original Production of the Year in the Chapman Tripp Awards that year) you’ll realise that At Circle’s E...

Mary Wiles at Canterbury University edited this beautiful catalogue (34pp) for Gaylene's recent retrospective at Te Papa Museum of New Zealand. It's a great overview of Gaylene's documentaries and biographical drama. I loved reading Keri Hulme's memories of being filmed by Gaylene, Mary Wiles' interview with Gaylene and Deborah Shepard's, Bruce Harding's and Paul Sutorius' contributions. The catalogue also includes a filmography I made as part of my archival work for Gaylene, with a wee reference to Corinn Columpar and Sophie Mayer's There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond , which helped me articulate how Gaylene can be understood as a feminist auteur. And I'm thrilled that by accident the filmography associates me with Gender & Women's Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, where the lovely lecturers made space for the work on Gaylene's archive, waaaay back in 2003: it was such a supportive and generous and life-and...

Leena Manimekalai   At the recent Mumbai Film Festival (MAMI), women wrote and directed six of the fourteen films competing for its major competition for first-time feature makers. And Satyen Bordoloi wrote an article, It’s Raining Women Filmmakers in Mami This Year . *  I questioned him about the MAMI article. Last year, I said, MAMI had an all-women jury headed by Jane Campion. The people who run this festival must be pro-women, that’s wonderful. No, he said. Until he mentioned it, the organizers didn’t even realise that there were so many women’s films. Rashid Irani, senior film critic and a selection committee member said to Satyen: When I’m talking to you, I realize that one of the most unprecedented things for any festival is that in the competition we have 6 debut women filmmakers...And each one of them is such a stunning debut that you have to see it to believe it. They’d just chosen the best films. That’s all. I continued to argue with Satyen. Women’s films are...

Alice Walker’s life and work have inspired me, shown me that it’s possible to be a writer and a global citizen with love, spirit, courage and laughter. There’s The Color Purple and Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation, as well as the Broadway musical. And there’s so much more: poems, essays, short stories, novels like Possessing the Secret of Joy —about female genital mutilation—and her latest book, The Chicken Chronicles . So when I heard that Pratibha Parmar of Kali Films was making a documentary about Alice Walker, called Beauty in Truth , I was very excited. And, because this is Alice Walker here, and there's a huge audience ready and waiting for a film about her, I was very surprised to learn that Kali Films needs funds to complete the project (like Arwen Curry with her doco The Worlds of Ursula Le Guin , though she has recently received some grants ). Pratibha Parmar is a multi-award-winning filmmaker with a family heritage of protest. She has lived and worked on four cont...

I love working with Kyna Morgan of Her Film . And from over there in North America, she keeps me in line, often through Twitter. Today, she tweeted about the New Zealand Film Commission’s (NZFC) Fresh Shorts decisions. Fresh Shorts is the NZFC's new low budget short film scheme, run in-house. It aims to identify the next generation of New Zealand feature filmmakers by nurturing and inspiring up-and-coming talent and it has just funded eight films at the $10,000 funding level and eight at $30,000 each. Kyna had been reading OnFilm online and found the NZFC press release. Here's what she wrote: @devt ur staying up on this, yeah? Looks like gender parity reached for funding. NZFC has no gender mandate, does it? bit.ly/oCRRWT @HerFilm Actually, I've kinda abandoned it, almost totally fruitless effort-- What's your take on this list? [I was cranky, because I HAD given up, and my mind was elsewhere.] Kyna didn’t respond. So—of course—I took a look. And she’d don...

A poster for Lynn Hershman's !Women, Art, Revolution I. Last Saturday, film writer Thelma Adams moderated the annual Amazing Women in Film Panel at the Woodstock Film Festival, with three women directors – Debra Granik ( Winter’s Bone ), Susan Seidelman (best known for Desperately Seeking Susan ) and Nancy Savoca (her latest, Union Square just at Toronto), critic Lisa Rosman , philanthropist Meera Gandhi , and activist Robin Bronk . Before the panel, Thelma blogged about questions FB and industry friends had raised. And when I read the post and saw ‘B. Ruby Rich’ I was hooked; she’s my hero, a long-time writer about women and feminism and film, and staunch activist — her book Chick Flicks is a classic. Furthermore, many of the questions offered to Thelma are relevant to Kali Films' Indiegogo campaign for funds to complete Pratibha Parmar's feature documentary on Alice Walker, Beauty in Truth . My next post is an interview with Pratibha, and somehow Thelma...

In a moving performance, Meryl Streep reads the words of  “ordinary, extraordinary” Afghan woman Zarcquona. This is the best 14 minutes and 51 seconds I've spent this year. I cried. I cheered. I am inspired. And loved the way Meryl Streep contextualised her reading. Meryl Streep's reading was part of the launch of the  Women in the World Foundation , a movement dedicated to advancing women and girls through stories and solutions. I hope that the Women in the World Foundation will link to and support women who tell stories on screens large and small, who are working hard to tell stories by, about, and for women. This morning, I'm thinking about Afia Nathaniel's  Neither the Veil Nor the Four Walls , which addresses one aspect of Zarcquona's story, expressed in another woman's life. I'm thinking about Pratibha Parmar's Beauty in Truth , about Alice Walker.

Andrea Arnold's one of my favorite filmmakers. One of the most exciting women writer/directors in the world, I think, for all kinds of reasons. Remember Wasp  (2003) which won the Academy Award for Live Action Short 2005 and was described by the Guardian as 'social realist film poetry'? Red Road (2006), which won the Prix du Jury at Cannes, and many other awards? Fish Tank (2009) which won multiple awards including the BAFTA for Outstanding British Film last year? Andrea Arnold at Cannes Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights has just premiered at the Venice Film Festival. According to the Guardian , Wuthering Heights is ...stripped of its period frills and sweeping score. It comes caked in grime and damp with saliva. The script is salted with profanities, while the plot finds room for brief moments of a nudity and an animalistic al-fresco sex scene. Heathcliff, the Byronic forefather of English romantic fiction, is black. And the first reviews, in a nice roundup ...