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SCRIPT
Marian Evans (a winner of the Embassy Theatre Trust Award for scriptwriting) wrote Development for her PhD at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington.
The script has gone through a rigorous development process. Marian’s supervisor, Ken Duncum (the Michael Hirschfeld Director of Screenwriting and 2010 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellow)describes it as 'elegant and powerful'. Los Angeles-based script surgeon Linda Voorhees recommends the script as 'exceptional', in a YouTube statement.
PRODUCTION
The production is modelled on the structure Sally Potter used for her classic feature about women, movies and gold — The Gold Diggers, starring Julie Christie and Colette Laffont. The core crew will be all women. Actors and crew members will all be paid the same. It will also be a ‘no-trucks’ shoot.
Our production and post-production budget is $100,000, thanks to generous contributions of equipment and facilities.
DELIVERY
After a gala premiere in Wellington, Development will be available to donors only for one month, to download right here, for free. And then freely available to everyone.
We’ll also provide space for you to engage with the film itself, and to contribute to the global debate about women’s filmmaking.
FUNDING
Thanks to the Victoria Foundation’s support, we have adopted the fiscal sponsorship concept from Women Make Movies and From the Heart. This structure provides donors with tax benefits.
THE FUTURE
Women wrote and directed only 9% of New Zealand features 2003-2008. We want Development’s model to inspire other women — especially New Zealand women — to try the same thing.
New Zealand led the way with women’s suffrage. We could become the first country in the world where women write and direct half of all feature films.
SPIRAL
Poet Heather McPherson founded Spiral in 1976, as a women’s arts and literary journal, to support and promote women artists and writers. Later the collective's ‘floating’ imprint moved to Wellington, was associated with The Women’s Gallery Inc, and published poetry and fiction, most famously Keri Hulme's Booker Prize-winning the bone people. Other collectives also used the imprint, as a brand that spoke of innovative and risk-taking commitment to women artists and writers. From 1997 Spiral has had some association with film, for example the Mahi Ata Mahi Ahua film festival and associated programme in 2003. Until 2005 The Women’s Gallery Inc was a registered charity, as the umbrella for various Spiral projects.
Heather McPherson writes: In the years since our 1970s feminism we women have learned that the message must be told over and over and over again: we are here, we are not just what the patriarchs want us to be, neither props nor mirrors, we are fully and equally human beings with our distinctive, necessary stories to tell and to be heard — as part of our survival as a species, as communities and as individual beings on this our beautiful, damaged, potentially retrievable planet. Development will be a major chord in the cultural richness of our stories.
http://www.vuw.ac.nz/staff/marian_evans/lesbian-landscapes/heather.htm
http://www.vuw.ac.nz/staff/marian_evans/women-pic-book/heather/heather.html
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