|
WINNER: Best Popular Documentary
2007
Programme Title: The Time of our Lives
Production Company: Gaylene Preston Productions
Channel: TV3
Click here to view winners
Click here to view awards
Her paintings have become national icons but the story
of her life is almost unknown. A documentary by Gaylene
Preston uncovers the mystery of Rita Angus.
Click
here to read article
http://www.canada.com/topics/travel/story.html
A New Zealander team including NZ
International Film festival Director Bill Gosden, NZOA
Board chair
Bernard
Duncan and Writer / Director Gaylene Preston recently
attended Imagem dos povos, the first Bazilian Film
festival of it’s kind.
New Zealand's Film and Television industry was the
festival’s
central focus. Aimed at promoting the cultural and commercial
interchange between the two countries in the hope of
opening up channels to allow for the circulation, exhibition,
purchase and sale of audiovisual products between both
Brazil and New Zealand.
Held in the Historic town of Ouro Preto, Imagem showcased
a wide range of New Zealand Films including 3 of Prestons
works – Mr Wrong, War Stories Our Mothers Never
Told Us and her most recent genre bender Perfect Strangers.
Along with her films Preston was asked to contribute
to a panel discussing filmmaking through the use of new
technology incorporating what advances and/or difficulties
that have arisen for her as a filmmaker. Other New Zealand
classics featured were An Angel At My table, The Piano
and Once Were Warriors alongside a portfolio of more
recent success’s.
For more information on Imagem dos povos please visit
their website
www.imagemdospovos.com.br
Ten
years after its first successful cinema release, and
in time for the
60th anniversary of the end of World War II, Gaylene
Preston1s War Stories
Our Mothers Never Told Us is now on DVD.
The DVD extras
contain an additional story from Doreen Blumhardt,
a well
known New Zealand educationalist and potter, who1s
story of the local German
experience in New Zealand during the War has much
to say to a modern
audience about racial prejudice and intolerance.
Also included is a
featurette on the seven women in the film and their
trip to Hollywood for
the US cinema release as well as a director1s commentary
with Gaylene
Preston and Interviewer Judith Fyfe.
To order a copy
please go to: www.arklesentertainment.com/warstories
August 27-September 2 2005 Vol 200 No 3407
by Denis
Welch
You won't believe this could happen in New Zealand,
but it did. They came to the door at about four o'clock
in
the morning with fixed bayonets and arrested my father
and took him away there and then. I never saw him again
till the end of the war."
Sixty-five years on,
and now nearly 92, Doreen Blumhardt still quivers with
outrage at the way her family were
treated in 1940. Yes, it was wartime, but they were
New Zealand citizens "like everyone else" and
as deserving of respect. Their big mistake was in having
a German name.
Her father David, born in Germany
but a New Zealander
for 50 years, was marched away in the middle of the
night to spend the rest of World War II interned with
other
suspect foreigners. Her brother Eberhard, required
to join the armed forces or suffer a similar fate,
made
life a little easier for himself by changing his name
to George. And she herself was grilled by the authorities.
"I was a New Zealander born and
bred," she says indignantly, "and
here I was treated like a foreigner. The main thing
was, they insisted that our father influenced us against the
British. It was incredible. You had no answer. You
didn't know how to answer. What could you say?"
Blumhardt's story was to
have been one of eight told by women in War Stories Our Mothers Never Told
Us, Gaylene Preston's celebrated 1995 film. But after
being
interviewed
she withdrew permission and the film went ahead without
her. With its re-release on DVD this month, she has
changed her mind.
"
While my father was still alive," she explains, "it
didn't seem fair, because he was badly treated in that
way. Anyway, it doesn't matter now any more. There
comes a time when – so what?"
Thankfully,
she herself has suffered no other anti-German prejudice
in her long lifetime – being called
Doreen must have helped – and still works at
the pottery for which she's well-known throughout the
country. "I'm
grateful to be a New Zealander," she says. "I'm
just fortunate to have been born here."
The DVD
also contains a featurette on the seven women who featured
in the original film and a commentary
by Preston and Judith Fyfe, who did the major interviewing
for the film.
All content ©2003-2004 APN Holdings NZ Ltd. All
rights reserved.
August 9th 2005
By Simon Vita, photograph Simon HaxtonGaylene
Preston film War Stories our Mothers Never told Us
is earning
itself the subtitle ‘as you’ve never heard
them before’.
The 1995 film is being released
on DVD with an enhanced soundtrack and previously
unseen footage.
The Mount
Victoria filmmaker says she has given the new DVD a
test drive at home and it sounds great.
“
You really do get planes flying through your sitting
room.”
War Stories is real ‘what did you
do in the war grandma?’ stuff.
It consists of interviews with seven women who detail
their experienced during WW2.
Upon release it won the
best film award at the New Zealand Film Awards, was
awarded best film at the Sydney
Film
Festival and was selected to screen in the American
Film Archive Foreign Premiere Programme.
Preston has
relished the opportunity to reissue the film.
“
It’s a wonderful opportunity to tart the old
girl up a bit.”
The DVD will also include an
interview with Northland potter Doreen Blumhardt,
recorded in 1993 but left
out of the original cut at the request of the subject.
Now, at the age of 92, she has decided
it is finally time for her story of prejudice and human
rights violation
to be told.
Preston says Blumhardt’s family
had sent food parcels to Germany between the wars, so
when
war was declared
they were marked for attention.
Blumhardt’s father
was taken from the family by “armed
police in jack boots” and put in an internment
camp for the duration of the war.
Preston says she
didn’t set out to make a political
film, but Blumhardt’s story has timely relevance
in the lead up to the general election.
The movie will be released on DVD on August 15.
Until then it screens at the Penthouse Cinema.
The Dominion
31st
May 2005
Toi Whakaari New Zealand drama student
Arthur Meek finishes dressing for his part in a performance
piece based on the World War II story of Flo Small, at
St Andrews on The Terrace in Wellington today. Mrs Smalls
American Husband, Warren Lassen, was killed on a warship
hit by
a Japanese torpedo. They had been married two years and
she was pregnant with their first child. She first told
her story in Wellington director Gaylene Preston's film
War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us. The drama school
students had adapted several stories told in the film,
as well
as other works from Alison Parr's book Silent Casualties
and Allen O'Leary's playFond Love and Kisses for the
show Battles of the Heart. It runs till Saturday.
By Graeme Tuckett
Perfect Strangers is an immediately
iconic and absolutely bloody delightful piece of filmmaking.
Alternating wildly in tone between brooding and anarchic,
flawed, muddy, improbable, infuriating, hilarious, bloodied
and utterly unbowed, this is a film to celebrate, to
love, to hate, but above all to watch, and watch again.
Kia kaha.? I wrote that about a year ago, after seeing
Gaylene Preston?s Perfect Strangers on a cramped little
arthouse screen. Today (Mar23) Perfect Strangers will
screen at the Embassy, as a special fundraiser for the
Greymouth Tornado victims. Great cause, stunning film.
Get yourself down there.
By Simon Vita
When a tornado tore Greymouth apart
earlier this month it also hit Mount Victoria filmmaker
Gaylene Preston hard.
Preston grew up in Greymouth and more
recently returned to the coast to shoot Perfect Strangers.
She has strong ties to the people
of the West Coast town and many of the locations in her
film were destroyed by the tornado.
Preston has organised a charity screening
of Perfect Strangers at the Embassy Theatre on tomorrow
night, March 25.
She says while she was filming in
Greymouth the people bent over backwards to help her.
One night they were shooting when
one of her assistants got a call from the stationmaster.
He said something like ?the 10.30pm
freight train is ready to depart for Christchurch, but
don?t want to send it in case the lights muck up the
shot. Ask her to give us the nod and we'll let it go?.
Preston says it is that sort of generosity
she would like to repay. The Insurance council estimates
the repair bill at more than $10 million, and Preston
says thefull extent of the damage is probably worse because
many people won't have insurance and are too staunch
to admit they need assistance.
In this case it may not have worked
in their favour.
Preston says there is a lot of goodwill
in the Capital and the fundraiser is an opportunity to
prove her right.
It's a chance for Wellington to show
the coast that we not always in suits turning up to ask
them to fill in forms
April 2005
By Gaylene Preston
Industry Report
Gaylene
Preston reports from Canada on an innovative scheme
to encourage women directors. How do you foster
female directors into a deeply competitive film and
television industry where, in English-speaking Canada
at least,
there is a huge US-based service industry and a swamped
local voice? With an annual budget of around
three quarters of a million Canadian dollars, the
Women
In the Director's Chair (WIDC) workshop tackles
this problem head-on. Inspired by the Australian
Film and Radio School efforts to develop unique local
voices - of women and also indigenous cultures -
the WIDC
was set up to fast-track eight carefully selected
'mid-career professionals' per year into helming
Canadian series TV and independent feature films.
This
is accomplished during an intensive three weeks of
organised chaos at The Banff Centre high in the
Canadian Rockies. The short time span means that
busy people with professional commitments can afford
to
participate without upsetting their work schedules.
Now in its ninth year, the scheme has been seriously
road tested. Entry to the programme is highly competitive,
but graduates emerge a real step ahead in realising
their projects. There is considerable buy-in from
the Canadian film industry, and this year two
experienced DOPs, two editors, nine actors, a couple
of first assistant directors and a production designer
supervised two full crews to realise the director-participants'
visions.
The plan is for each director
to make a three-to five-minute dramatic scene of
a finished drama in as close to true industrial circumstances
as possible. This means eight scenes need to
be cast, designed, shot, edited, post-produced
and mixed to the highest possible standard. Organised
chaos is an understatement.
The women have access to two
studios, around seventy people (the course also
clips on advanced trainees in most production areas)
and a talent pool of nine experienced film actors
(miraculously after a day of group auditions every
director got her first casting choice). And through
a mixture of support and crisis development,
the eight women emerged fully confident directors
of drama.
They weren't exactly slugs to
begin with. One had run a well-known theatre
troupe for 25 years; another had an Emmy
for her documentary work; the
others had made prize-winning shorts or
TV documentaries. The group had met
last December, gathering at Banff for several
days to work with a mentor
script editor to polish their scenes. Most
had chosen to work on material
from the feature film they wanted to make,
and all scenes were appropriate
to be shot in a studio setting.
So, there I was -
'mentor director' with very little idea about how
the whole thing worked and wondering how we
were going to foster eight uniquely distinctive
voices in such a hothouse machine. I needn't have
worried. Carol Whiteman, the producer and co-founder
of the programme and the CEO of Creative
Women Workshops Association (which presents WIDC
in partnership with The Banff Centre and ACTRA),
was on hand. She reminded us that more than anything
else the programme was about process and that experimentation
was essential. We were there to push the boundaries
(one
director even shot her scene twice using two entirely
different styles).
As for my involvement, I think
they appreciated a different view from a different
place. We've got enough in common, the Canadians
and the New Zealanders (same colonial root, happy
to apologise on entering a room - that
sort of thing). And I had one advantage over a local
'mentor director' - I wasn't likely to go on about
the funding bodies because I didn't know the scene.
This broke the old adage: 'When two or more filmmakers
gather, all they do is talk about funding'.
We did something far more inspiring.
We contemplated the craft of it, the
art of it, the politics of it, the wonder and the
glory of it. For three weeks, as blizzards came and
went and the sun shone and skiers frolicked in two-feet
thick powder, the faculty, the director-participants,
the actors, the crews and the trainees went on
an amazing trip together with the humble
art of filmmaking. It was a blast.
And on behalf of us down here in NZ, I taught them
how
and when to say, 'You get that a bit'. They liked
that.
I would like to investigate whether
there's any interest in sending a director-participant
from our neck of the woods next year. It's the tenth
year for the WIDC programme and they're prepared
to look
at the proposition. Any one of the female
persuasion interested? Contact TAKE
and we'll go from there.
The ever-engaging Gaylene Preston
walked Holly around her Wellington haunts one afternoon
and talked about what drives her art, the nature
of Kiwis and getting her message across.
Click
here for interview
|
