Archive for the ‘Your stories’ Category

By David Luoni

Cuba Crisis No.1. Image courtesy of Tauranga Art Gallery, from a private collection.

Gore’s Eastern Southland Gallery is hosting a compelling retrospective of Edward (Ted) Bullmore’s art entitled ‘A Surrealist Odyssey’. Ted Bullmore was a southern lad who grew up on the family’s farm at Balfour but his talent lent itself to acquiring cultural rather than rural capital. Gore has now caught up with Bullmore’s genius and is proudly celebrating it. If only we’d had the foresight to do this 40 years ago when Bullmore needed it, having returned home from a productive nine year stint in Europe only to find himself working in relative obscurity in Rotorua. Sadly, Ted Bullmore died young, aged only 45, after having a heart attack in 1978.

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Vanguard Films have waved the flag for the dispossessed and the underdog, for social and peace activists, for women and working people, teachers and unionists, anyone essentially, not of the ruling class, over the past thirty long years, as well as tackling environmental issues.

Vanguard is a small, socialist collective of Wellington-based filmmakers who’ve remained dedicated and active over the last three decades. To celebrate this 30th anniversary, the Film Archive presents Vanguard Films: 30 years – A better world is possible – two weeks of screenings spanning the collective’s output from 1981 to 2008.

The Film Archive have set us this challenge – “From The Hollow Men, to the Waihopai spy base, if you’re not familiar with these documentaries and you call yourself a New Zealander, you need to get watching”.

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By Marianne Taylor, Executive Director, Arts Access Aotearoa

Many of us take the arts for granted. We go to the theatre or a concert; take painting, dance or creative writing classes; and book our tickets to the New Zealand International Film Festival every year.

But what if you have a disability that makes it difficult for you to participate? After all, an estimated 660,300 people (17% of the population) reported a disability in the 2006 Statistics New Zealand survey. Perhaps you use a wheelchair or are sight-impaired. Maybe your disability is less obvious: you experience epilepsy, asthma or migraines.

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On Monday night Arts Access Aotearoa held their annual Big ‘A’ Awards, celebrating the outstanding achievements of individuals and organisations working to enhance the artistic lives of people who have been marginalised by the mainstream.

The 2009 winners included a talented young writer who has overcome the odds, a mixed-ability dance company, a theatre project inspiring teenagers and the elderly, and a prison arts advocate.

Marianne Taylor, Executive Director of Arts Access Aotearoa, said the Awards pay tribute to the artistic work happening in New Zealand communities. “Everyone has the right to participate in the arts and express themselves creatively,” she said. “These awards are a way of acknowledging the people and organisations that help make this possible.”

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It’s September and it’s New Zealand Book Month!

The aim of NZ Book Month is to support and encourage Kiwi writers to keep creating and to show off their talents to New Zealand readers. The organisers of NZ Book Month say, “Quite simply, the idea is to get more of us reading New Zealand books”.

www.NZHistory.net.nz is celebrating Book Month with ‘30 reasons to love New Zealand books and writing’. The site has a bookcase full of stories and inspiration for each day of the month, from stories of ‘Ponga and Puhihuia’ and ‘Hutu and Kawa’ the Pohutukawa Fairies to a history of The Listener and kids’ favourite Hairy Maclary – all brought to life with great images.

And don’t forget to check out your literary literacy by doing the New Zealand Book Month quiz.

The 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing have come and gone, providing us with entertainment, victory, heartbreak, lashings of good old national fervour and some respite from the depths of winter.

Beijing 2008 has been lauded as one of our finest Olympic efforts. The team came home with nine medals – placing us 26th overall. But we ranked 5th in medals table on a per-capita basis. Our congratulations go to those triumphant Kiwis who contributed to the best medal haul of the last two decades. Let’s take a look at just some of the other records that were broken in Beijing:

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Last night the programme for the 37th Wellington Film Festival was launched at the Paramount in Wellington. It’s always a packed event and the hottest ticket in town is the ’still warm from the press’ festival brochure. This year the brochure has a brand-spanking new format. It’s big, it’s glossy and it’s bulging with celluloid treats. The website has also been spruced up and it’s fabulous and informative – check it out at www.nzff.co.nz. And in a smart move the festival is making the most of our obsession with Web 2.0 and have their very own MySpace page where you can see snippets of some of the films on offer.

The 2008 Festival line-up is chock-a-block with good Kiwi talent and includes the largest number ever of feature-length New Zealand films. Well done, we say! Fourteen diverse works from the South to North Island represent the New Zealand of today in all its vibrant shades: idiosyncratic, traditional, outrageous, conformist, gritty, ephemeral.

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Māori Television has launched a short film competition to encourage all New Zealanders to re-tell their own ANZAC stories on film and have them screened as part of the channel’s all-day broadcast on ANZAC Day - Friday April 25, 2008.

The ANZAC Short Film Competition is a chance to tell an ANZAC story. The competition is open to people of all ages, backgrounds and points of view.

Filmmaker Ainsley Gardiner – host of the short film competition along with Tearepa Kahi – says the first-hand recollections and stories of those who have experienced the events commemorated on ANZAC Day are a taonga that will eventually be lost if they are not recorded in some way.

The competition has been established to ensure that the experiences and memories of those veterans and whānau are preserved for future generations and also aims to foster creativity, collaboration and excellence in visual storytelling through short film.

“Kiwis, young and old, are encouraged to find the unique personal war stories of their family members or communities – from the trenches, in the air, at sea, at home, after the war or beyond – and use today’s technology to bring them to light,” explains Tearepa.

“The emphasis is on giving it a go, grabbing some mates or whānau, picking up a camera and putting your take on ANZAC Day into a short film of five minutes or less.”

Entry forms and full details are available from Māori Television’s website or email anzacday@maoritelevision.com for further information.

By Patrick Whatman, Wellington music aficionado

Friday the 21st of September saw me heading out to Wellington’s San Francisco Bathhouse for a show that I had been anticipating for some time. OdESSA were celebrating the launch of their new album The Prize with what can only be described as a party, fiesta or indeed bonanza.

As a rabid OdESSA fan, impartiality may not be my strong-suit, but who cares?

The show kicked off with The Thomas Oliver Band, a three-piece who perform interesting blues-rock, if owing quite a lot to Dave Matthews and Ben Harper. I arrived a little late, and only caught the end of their set, but it seemed that the crowd had sure enjoyed it. By the time they had finished, there was little keeping the masses contained.

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I’ve been reading about peer-to-peer marketing strategies. Although I’ve struggled to find a definition, I think that peer-to-peer marketing is about capitalising on your audience’s willingness (or rather, a segment of your audience) to market your product on your behalf. 

Methods for influencing people’s decisions have changed radically. If we can provide the tools (largely web-based) that help our audiences organise and socialise, they will influence the decisions of others, ultimately helping to build audiences at events. 

Strategies might include posting reviews or testimonials or pictures on your website from people attending your events, allowing visitors to email events information from your website to friends, through to creating quirky ‘viral advertising’ that gets posted on YouTube or other content-sharing sites or passed from one person to another via email. 

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