Noticias

Exclusive: Six New Zealand screenwriters have been chosen to participate in the inaugural Black List New Zealand Project.

The project, stemming from a partnership between the Black List and the New Zealand Film Commission, is a professional development workshop and mentorship series. Bolstered by the presence of global screen industry executives, who will head up panels, mentor the writers and advise them on fine-tuning their scripts, its aim is to amplify the voices of underrepresented filmmakers, while promoting relationships between writers and producers, and creating international opportunities for New Zealand feature films.

The six participating filmmakers will receive up to Nz$25,000 in development financing from the Nzfc for completing the next draft of their scripts. The scripts they submitted to land a spot at the Black List New Zealand Project cover genres ranging from romance to comedy, crime and horror, and were selected from a pool of 179 for their unique perspectives.

Screen Australia CEO Graeme Mason speaking at the Power of Inclusion conference. (Photo: Fiona Goodall/Getty Images)

When it comes to representing the diversity of the Australian population, both in front of and behind the camera, it is film in particular that continues to be a “problem area”, according to Screen Australia CEO Graeme Mason.

Mason spoke last week at the New Zealand Film Commission’s (Nzfc) Power of Inclusion conference in Auckland, on a panel with Nzfc CEO Annabelle Sheehan, National Screen Institute – Canada acting director Joy Loewen and Geena Davis Institute CEO Madeleine di Nonno, looking at country-specific initiatives aimed at broadening representation on and off screen.

Screen Australia’s development-focused Gender Matters initiative has been successful in “flooding the pipeline” with female-led projects, Mason told the conference.

He made a shout out to Rachel Griffiths’ Ride Like A Girl, the first feature funded via the program to enter production,...

Nandita Das's debut film is yet another look at terror, though this time it is one unleashed by majority Hindus on minority Muslims in the Western Indian State of Gujarat in early 2002. Official version says 3,000 mostly Muslims were butchered, but the number could well be higher in what the world termed "genocide". Das and Auckland University professor Shuchi Kothari have written a script that goes beyond the dramatic: it is a terrifying account, fictionalised out of a "1000 true tales".