War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us, Gaylene Preston Productions, 1995

Director/producer: Gaylene Preston
Interviewer: Judith Fyfe

Interviews: Pamela Quill, Flo Small, Tui Preston, Jean Andrews, Rita Graham, Neva Clarke Mckenna, Mabel Waititi

Colour & black and white, 92 mintues, G

“These war stories, unadorned and told with heart and soul, are mesmerizing.” — Peter Calder, New Zealand Herald, 19 May 1995

“One at a time, with minimum editorial interruption, seven elderly women face the camera and speak about the impact on their lives of World War II. There are newsreel clips and vivid contributions from the storytellers' photo albums. But what renders these War Stories enthralling is the more fundamental allure of revelation stacked upon revelation. Tales that lead us with such plain assurance to the storyteller's heartfelt truth make spellbound children of us all ...” — Bill Gosden, New Zealand International Film Festival, 1995

“When I screen War Stories I can feel the audience saying to themselves in the first minute, ‘O my god, this is a documentary. It is going to be boring. I’m going to have to think. I’m going to be told something’. You can feel this terrible panic. But then Pamela [Quill] picks you up and takes you off to the tennis club dance and describes that wonderful experience of falling in love for the first time and then presents a picture of the man that was to become her husband and he looks like a young Marlon Brando. With that the audience is captivated by the film for the next ninety minutes. In Los Angeles they leapt to their feet at the end and gave the women a standing ovation. The screening of War Stories was the first time that the American Film Institute Associates had included a documentary in its foreign film fund raiser effort, and no doubt the first, and probably the last, time that they had the entire living cast in their presence.” — ‘First Say and Last Cut’: A Conversation with Gaylene Preston’, Keith Beattie, New Zealand Journal of Media Studies, vol.3, no.1, 1996

Preceded by
Dead Letters, Quarter Acre Pictures, 2006, 14 minutes
Director/writer: Paolo Rotondo

Producers: Gemma Gracewood, Fraser Brown
With: Yvette Reid, Gareth Reeves

On the 'home front' in 1943, Ngarie and Gerald sort air graph letterforms destined for New Zealand soldiers abroad. A tiny act of heroism brings together this unlikely pair in an unconventional love story that cleverly blends fact with fiction.

Filmland Neuseeland
This film programme was presented during October at the FIlmmuseum in Frankfurt as part of the cultural activities accompanying New Zealand’s Guest of Honour role at the Frankfurt Book Fair. New Zealand literature has had a huge influence on film production here; not only as a source of stories and themes, but also as a starting point for thinking about style and approach (the liking for naturalism and an interest in local details and ordinary people, for example). The programme is drawn from the DVD that accompanies New Zealand Film: an Illustrated History. The selection surveys New Zealand film from the early silent period to the end of the 20th century. Through the mix of features and documentaries with short films we hope to illustrate the emergence of a distinctive style of film making and story telling.