This week, to write what I've agreed to write, I’ve had to come back to New Zealand gender statistics, after eighteen months of learning from countries’ figures, most of them supplied by others – France, Sweden, the United States (including films by women from around the world shown at festivals there), Australia and Canada. New Zealand has a much smaller population than any of these countries and I’ve been able to identify most of the features that have reached production, perhaps almost all. Most on the list have been released in cinemas or shown on television but some have been offered taxpayer production funding and are somewhere in the process between early pre-production and post-production. The list excludes feature documentaries but includes a group of hybrid works –
Home By Christmas,
Rain of the Children,
Love Story,
The Red House,
Beyond the Edge,
Giselle. I haven’t included films that New Zealand writers and directors filmed overseas and New Zealand taxpayers didn't fund at all, like Niki Caro’s
North Country, Christine Jeff’s
Sunshine Cleaning and Miro Bilbrough’s
Being Venice. And there are some New Zealand women directors who aren’t represented on this list – Jane Campion who recently came home to make a teleseries
Top of the Lake and Alison Maclean who will return to Christchurch to shoot her adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s
The Rehearsal, which she’s writing with Emily Perkins. And Christine Jeffs, about
to direct Wonderful Tonight, a romantic comedy with Amanda Seyfried and Patrick Dempsey.
This list shows that we have a gender problem (or two). A related post, inspired by an unexpected email, will come soon and consider a couple of possible new solutions.
