Diverse Voices: Filmmaker Pachali Brewster

Visual:

The video begins with a gloved hand pulling a metal dome food cover off a silver platter, to reveal a card, written on the card: “You are cordially invited to... Make Screen Work Different — a conversation on diversity, innovation, and sustainability in the screen sector.”

In this video, eight people sit around a table. The table is set up like a high tea, additionally, there are many funky objects on the table, including a globe, stress balls, sticks, instruments, dried flowers in vases, and many other wacky objects. Throughout the video, the camera will cut to some of the items on the table, for example, as Casey talks about ‘the world’ we get a close-up on the globe. As each person talks, the camera cuts to them. It also introduces each person at their first instance of talking.

Text on screen: Kathleen Winter

Audio, Kathleen Winter: I wanna be here as a queer person, I wanna be here as a gender minority, but I also don’t wanna be here... just as those things.

Text on screen: Jade Jackson

Audio, Jade Jackson: Just having these conversations and realising we’re all going through really similar things, no matter who we are or what our backgrounds are...

Text on screen: Casey Zilbert

Audio, Casey Zilbert: How long can white, male mediocrity rule... the globe?

Text on screen: Aditya B. Parige

Audio, Aditya B. Parige: What does it look like to have three cultures intersect? It could be really messy. It could be really harmonious, like could be a billion, different things.

Text on screen: Missy Molloy — facilitator

Audio, Missy Molloy: Cinema is about everyone telling stories and none of ours is at all the same. It should be an opportunity for us to shift away from telling the same set of stories, like the hero with the thousand faces idea. We’ve seen it.

Text on screen: Laura Yilmaz

Audio, Laura Yilmaz: I would certainly argue the arts are not a luxury and they are a necessity, but I think many people, unfortunately, don’t agree with me.

Text on screen: Raqi Syed — facilitator

Audio, Raqi Syed: I actually wanna compete in the ‘General Category’, and I wanna be able to hold my own and tell my story there.

Text on screen: Oriwa Hakaraia

Audio, Oriwa Hakaraia: Teamwork makes the dream work.

Visual:

Text on screen: Diverse voices — Making Screen Work Different
Text on screen: The Wellington UNESCO City of Film — Te Ūpoko o te Ika logo
Text on screen: A documentary series on diversity, innovation, and sustainability within the Wellington screen sector.

Visual:

• A gloved hand lifts a metal food covering from a tray, revealing a piece of paper. Written on the paper is the word ‘diversity’, and its dictionary definition, saying, “The practice of inducing people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds, and of different genders, abilities, sexual orientations etc.”
• The camera returns to the people talking.

Audio:

Kathleen Winter: I guess I baulked that thing of answering, “In what way am I diverse?” That question of like, “Are you L or G or B or T or Q or I, or A, or ?” You know, and that kind of real micro way of identifying ourselves. Which in some cases is really useful. But often it can be quite divisive, and also is sometimes really culturally inappropriate. I don’t know. I guess that’s where my discomfort sits, is that I wanna be here as kind of a queer person. I wanna be here as, like, a gender minority, but I also don’t wanna be here... just as those things?

Casey Zilbert: As someone who is bisexual, as someone who is nonbinary, as someone who has significant medical issues and neurodivergence... All of those things make me the incredible storyteller that I am. When I try to talk to people about ticking, many, many boxes... I’m not getting a fucking award. You know what I mean? “Yeah, but you’re just trying to be ‘diverse’ now, because it’s very ‘on vogue’”, and you’re like “Baby. I was doing this before it was cool.” And so I think that’s the other part of it, of feeling like we are being used, not embraced.

Kathleen Winter: Yeah, or like side-eyed as if we are capitalising on our diversity.

Casey Zilbert: We’re suddenly cashing in on that queer money.

Kathleen Winter: Yeah.

Casey Zilbert: Which is like — Did you get your queer check? I haven’t got mine yet.

Raqi Syed: I often think that being, uh, not a diverse person is really just the privilege of being medium. You know? Like, you can just be yourself and you don’t have to constantly, pass that threshold of excellence. And as a result, you get many, many opportunities to prove yourself. What I’m hearing is that this issue of diversity, it’s a wicked problem. Meaning it is difficult to solve, and the word “diversity”, it’s shorthand for this complex problem, but it is helping us get at the heart of the problem. And it does give us at least the language as a group to come together and solve the problem for ourselves.

Visual:

• A hand lifts the food cover off the plate again, revealing another paper card with the word ‘problem’ written on it, and its dictionary definition. It says:
  1. A question raised for inquiry, consideration, or solution.
  2. A source of perplexity, distress or vexation.
  3. Difficulty, in understanding or accepting.
• The camera cuts back to the people talking.

Audio:

Jade Jackson: I get really annoyed that there will be one P.I. (Pacific Islander) person that is allowed to tell that story and get that funding. And once that is done, it’s done. And there are so many of us who have completely different life experiences.

Aditya B. Parige:  They’re identifying who your competition is for you, right? Which is my competition is; wherever the next Indian director guy is. And like that sucks. Like, I should be compared to another filmmaker who’s trying to make a period piece.

Jade Jackson: The way I had to shoot ‘RAIDS’. I had been pitching it and I was trying to get funding and going around, but again, it was the labour that me and my community, we ended up having to put in to tell the story. Because *we* thought it was important, because *we* thought it was time that we needed to stand up and say, guys, the dawn raids happened. We have a community here in New Zealand that doesn’t feel like they belong because of them. I put in the hours, I struggled with my mental health. And we had no budget. And we created this amazing short film ‘RAIDS’ that now... Yeah, this is great, because it’s out there, and I have so many P.I. young people that come to me and say like, “Oh, my God. Now, I’ve seen ‘RAIDS’”. Like, “I can do that!” And “How can I do that?” And we’re working together now to figure these things out. But, um, yeah, I just... There’s just something about that.

Casey Zilbert: My first main job as a lead writer on a TV show; The only reason I’m up for it is because the writer, Maria Lewis, took a pay cut to make sure that that lead writer role went to a woman or a person of colour. And I connected with Maria, and the material of what she was trying to do talked about the empowerment of women and the empowerment of indigenous women. The entire writing table for this TV show for women, indigenous women specifically, the team they gave me was entirely white men. It doesn’t matter how many conversations we try and have with executives. If they don’t get it, they don’t get it, and it’s not gonna change until we have more women, people of colour and queer people in those development roles, but also the financing level.

Raqi Syed:  The way in which you nurture diverse talent is you take a risk and allow them to do something that is ‘unestablished’ or “We don’t know about it.” “We don’t understand this intersection of genres, so let’s see what happens.” But we wanna uplift all of these folks at the margins that are starting off their careers and fighting for these small amounts of money, like create a pathway for us, because I actually don’t see that pathway. I see that there’s like a stratification.

Laura Yilmaz:  It’s like the definition of insanity, right? Is to keep doing the same thing over and over again, but then expect a different result. It’s like you can’t, you can’t get something different. You can’t attract a new audience if you are not willing to take a risk.

Visual:

• A hand reveals another paper card with the words ‘How Can We Make Screen Different’ written on it, and the dictionary definition of different. It says:
  1. Not the same as another or each other, unlike in nature, form, or quality.
  2. Novel and unusual.
• The camera cuts back to the people talking.

Audio:

Oriwa Hakaraia: People get lost in this city, especially people from coloured backgrounds. Like, the urbanisation of Māori has really affected the way that Māori live in a city. There’s no place for them. I’m a bit wealthy in terms of, like, I grew up with this bank of knowledge, and I’m super grounded in who I am, and I know who I am. And I, there are so many other people from coloured backgrounds that, that don’t grow up with that privilege. If you set up some sort of practice, like within the CBD that nourishes that, not only for the benefit of Māori within Wellington, or living within the Wellington region, it’s also... it benefits everybody. It’s that interconnected sort of... community. It’s very much like a Tukutuku panel. Like, woven strands. Everything’s just woven together.

Jade Jackson: There’s something to be said about learning from the indigenous and our way of life because it’s all-encompassing and it’s really inclusive. It involves everyone. There’s definitely something to be said for us to, strip away what has happened to Aotearoa, and look to the people of the land, our Māori people, and what their systems and rituals were because they are so beautiful. And there’s just a lot to learn from that.

Aditya B. Parige:  I’m new to New Zealand. I’m not gonna qualify for the film commission to get funding. Like, I think a lot of the time for people, at least for me and other examples in my life, I would’ve used something like that to go, “Oh, well then I shouldn’t do this.” This is the first time I didn’t do that. Getting that money from the commission and the other two organisations, the Indian organisations, wasn’t an easy feat. But like, because I did that, I was able to reap a lot more benefits than the last eight years I’ve spent in the industry.

Raqi Syed: If we have a voice as a city, it’s that we are expanding what the screen means, and we’re really exploring immersiveness, interactivity, linearity, nonlinearity, like, it’s all like a big, giant melting pot. Laura, you had some very interesting things to say about moving into different mediums with your screenwork, and there’s a really beautiful quote that I’m going to share with everyone. You said, “I grew up with games, but games didn’t grow up with me.” 

Laura Yilmaz: Games are a medium that I’m super interested in. I think this is where media is going. I think it’s a place of immense growth. And I think that there is so much unexplored, fertile soil that is being left untilled by this entire industry. One of the projects, the first project that, I was working on was an intensely narrative story, that was about a middle-aged woman who was based on the experiences of both of our grandmothers. My grandmother grew up in rural Turkey. Very poor. There, there were a couple of publishers that we got into pretty deep talks with. And the one that we got the farthest with it was the only time, there was a middle-aged woman of colour across the table from us. So I just wanna point out that the representation, not just in front of, but also behind the scenes is extremely important.

Casey Zilbert: It’s really hard to get excited about anything in traditional anymore in that regards because there’s the creative freedom, the ability to explore different narratives across different platforms. I like things like TikTok because it’s probably the cheapest piece of intellectual property that you will ever be able to protect. So in regards to being able to go, “I wanna tell a small joke. I wanna do a series of things. I wanna create a world and I don’t wanna have spend. A whole bunch of money or write a screenplay and protect it.” It allows you to have something out there, and test it with an audience. But there are better effects in TikTok than I would ever be able to afford to get put into my films.

Visual:

• The hand once again reveals another card, this time with the word ‘furthermore’ and its dictionary definition. It says:
  1. In addition (used to introduce a fresh consideration in an argument).
• The camera cuts back to the people talking.

Audio:

Raqi Syed: But how can we feed this back up into the structures of the industry itself, so that there’s an enactment of legislation policy to make some of these changes that we’ve been talking about?

Missy Molloy:  I was thinking of Denmark, cause that’s the film industry I’m most familiar with, but they actually have this, thing called New Danish Screen, which was like a very tiny $100,000-ish dollar budget.

Raqi Syed: ‘Microgrants’. Yeah.

Missy Molloy:  And they would give them mainly to very recent grads who had no feature film yet, who only had their graduation film. And there are a lot of people that support the basic principles of universal income. That’s the only way to really achieve any sort of equality is that you would fund everybody, and then give everyone that luxury that we all have to fight for, and work in hospo, and work in any kind of field.

Kathleen Winter: I’m very much on the film as art and film, serving a really important cultural purpose, which is completely separate from whether it makes money or not. And I would really love if our local funding bodies were championing the cultural importance of work over its likely profitability. But yeah, one thing that I do notice that is kind of missing in Aotearoa’s industry is a lot of support for the really early development of our projects. That’s kind of a lot of the invisible work. Like I’ve been in the industry for like years. And for the first half of that, I was working minimum wage jobs alongside my film work. And then a lot of that I’ve been going on and off the benefit as well. Because the work goes like this like, you get the funding, and then you’re, like, riding high for a period of time. And then you have absolutely nothing until it gets picked up. And you have to have that downtime to develop the work. When money is really poured into development, and people are given time in that space, they’re really able to create quality content.

Raqi Syed: One of the things I have learned about going to film festivals, and spaces where I’m in dialogue with other filmmakers, is that often I’ve gone to festivals with the idea that “I gotta get my film funded.” “I need to find this person from the top, who’s gonna reach down the hand of God and help me make a thing.” And then what happens is those people are never there “cause the “cavalry’s not coming”. But also, I talk to my peers, and they reach across the table, and they make things happen for me. And that is how my projects get made. And I feel like this has been that kind of day.

Missy Molloy: When you feel good about the work that you’re doing and the way you’re doing it, which I think is probably the most important thing, in terms of sustaining an intersectional film and community and related media practice.

Casey Zilbert: So in order for us to find success, we need to build something new. And is that hard? Fuck yes. But can we build a system that works for us and one that’s more rewarding, and ultimately sort of try and do it in a way that aligns with our culture? Cause you’re right, you know? How long can white male mediocrity rule the globe?

Kathleen Winter: We’ve talked a little bit about hierarchy in the film industry, and the kind of classic way of doing things, and how that doesn’t really work for most of us. And just quietly in our own sets, working in different ways, relating to people in different ways. That is, in its own way, changing the industry.

Aditya B. Parige: Yeah, hopefully, we get to the point where we’ve seen so many different types of movies, that seeing a movie about a random white guy in the middle of America feels diverse again. You, know? That means we’ve come full circle.

[laughter]

Oriwa Hakaraia: There’s like a proverb that we use “Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, he toa takitini.” So, “My win is not that of my own, but that of the thousands.”

[Cheers!]

Visual:

They all cheer drinks over the table.

A clip of card paper shows, written on it the credits. These are written below:

• Producer, Writer and Director: Pachali Brewster.
• Director of photography, editor and colourist: Ben Dickens.
• Featuring:
  • Oriwa Hakaraia
  • Jade Jackson
  • Aditya B. Parige
  • Kathleen Winter
  • Laura Yilmaz
  • Casey Zilbert
  • Raqi Syed and Missy Molloy as the facilitators
  • and Glen McLaughlin as the butler.
• Special Thanks to:
  • Massey’s School of Music and Creative Media Production 
  • College of Creative Arts Toi Rauwhārangi.
• Production manager assistant, 1st assistant director, and Unit: Anna Valentine.
• 2nd camera operator: Elise Lanigan.
• 3rd camera operator: Nathan Roys.
• Sound Recordist: Jessy McNamara.
• Sound Recordist Assist and sound mixer: Matt Asunder
• Art Department: Glen McLaughlin.
• Hair and Makeup artist: Serena Parsons.
• Stills photography: Celeste Fontein.
• Runner: Ivy Robinson.