Marian Evans, who writes a blog about her work and women in the New Zealand film industry (sister blog to Her Film, by the way — see the page link above), wrote a piece about getting into film and shares some fascinating insights about the New Zealand film industry.  Women don’t often take the same path as men, and Marian herself is a filmmaker (Development) who is trying to move NZ toward gender parity in the percentages of films made in New Zealand by New Zealand filmmakers.  Her research for her Ph.D. focused on this issue.   An excerpt from her blog post this week reads:

Other women, like me, are drawn by the feature film’s long form, the idea of a big screen and a community sitting in front of it, watching my film together. (I also love the idea of distributing a film through the internet and on cellphones.)

To make a feature film, we need money. In New Zealand that usually means approaching our state film funder, the New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC). And according to my PhD research it has a gender problem: its investment in women writers and directors is far less than its investment in men, in its feature film programmes, in its short film programme—the traditional ‘pathway’ to feature filmmaking—and in various other programmes. This is a concern, because New Zealand ratified the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1985; as a state, New Zealand—and its agencies, like the NZFC—must encourage the participation of women in public life on equal terms with men (article 7). And screen-based storytelling is certainly part of public life.
READ MORE OF MARIAN EVANS’ BLOG “WELLYWOOD WOMAN.”