Programme Title: The Time of our Lives
Production Company: Gaylene Preston Productions
Channel: TV3
The Arts: The Lovely Rita By Kelly Andrews, The Dominion Post,
Wednesday 7 November 2007
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.
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
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, who's 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 director's
commentary with Gaylene Preston and Interviewer Judith Fyfe.
SPRECHEN SIE KIWI?
New Zealand Listener
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.
Cook Strait News,
Capital Community Newspapers
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.
THEATRE OF WAR
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.
A great week of flicks
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.
PRESTON DOING HER PART IN HELPING
GREYMOUTH
Cook Strait News
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
WOMEN IN THE DIRECTOR'S CHAIR
TAKE Magazine
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.
Doco dynamo - Interview
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.
