Wellywood Woman: Safety in Paradise?

Wellywood Woman: Safety in Paradise?:<< Link to article

• Carmen Potter, Heather Bramwell, Natalie Kahukura Ellen-Eliza and 2 others like this.
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  Wells Tao "I always notice how few [films by women] there are at film festivals. I went to Créteil International Women’s Film Festival in France with Wasp in 2004, stayed on for a few days and watched all these films by women. I spent the whole time crying because there were so many films that had so much resonance for me, being female. It actually made me realise how male-dominated the film industry is in terms of perspective. If you think about a film being a very popular and expressive way of showing a mirror on life, we’re getting a mainly male perspective. It’s a shame. I saw a lot of fantastic films at Créteil that I never heard about again. " - quote

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  Wells Tao " Finally, when I read the #nziff director’s ‘Welcome’ in the catalogue I considered the role of taxpayer funding of the festival, in a kind of anti-women institutionalised synergy. The New Zealand Film Commission (#NZFC) makes a substantial contribution to the #nziff, year after year. This is how the festival’s (male) director sees that contribution–
  
  The major sponsorship we receive from the New Zealand Film Commission is the best institutional endorsement of a long-standing notion of ours: that a smartly curated influx of the best and latest of international cinema stimulates the vitality of our own creative culture.
  
  Why is the #NZFC endorsing the #nziff’s limited commitment to films by and about women? Can the #nziff really claim to be ‘smartly curated’ or to ‘stimulate the vitality of our own creative culture’ when ‘Time and time again [women] don’t get our share of representation’ as directors at the #nziff and when women and girls are at the centre of the work selected, those stories are predominantly told by men?"

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  Wells Tao "Like the Safety in Paradise video and the #nziff selection, the use of mesh in New Zealand is a small country version of a global problem, with its own unique slant. The Women's Health Council and WHA research shows that the institutions that should protect New Zealanders and women affected by vaginal mesh insertion have all failed, "

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  Wells Tao "Veteran women’s health campaigner Sandra Coney, one of the authors of the article that exposed the ‘unfortunate experiment’ posted this the other day on Facebook–
  
  I was on an advisory committee in 1986 which recommended a regulatory system for medical devices - everything from hip replacements to heart valves to IUDs and products like mesh. Nearly 30 years later we still do not have one. It's a disgrace."

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  Wells Tao "But Jacqui Scott still had her two kinds of mesh. She had extreme pain from pudendal nerve damage. She had limited mobility. She had a compromised immune system. She got shingles. She'd lost her teeth. Her hair was falling out. She suffered from severe depression. She was passing mesh and/or sutures through her bowel. And she suffered from the chronic serial violation caused within the institutions that she turned to for help."

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  Wells Tao "raising the issue of the serial violation Jacqui had experienced, including violation-by-bureaucracy, I believed that because one of the ministry’s four platforms is violence against women, that it would be aware of New Zealand’s history of medical failures in the care of women’s genitalia, that it would understand that Jacqui’s situation was probably not unique, and that it would be concerned and helpful. It was not. I then approached women’s affairs spokespeople from every party and their responses were also unsatisfactory, if they responded at all.

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