Development: Opening Space for New Zealand Women's Participation in Scriptwriting for Feature Films?

Abstract

This thesis explores whether an analytical practice, combining creative writing with activism and based in academia, can help open space for more women scriptwriters within New Zealand feature filmmaking. It links autoethnography with activist and experience-based methodologies within a creative writing framework that includes a memoir, an essay, a report, diaries and emails, an essay screenplay and weblogging, to present multiple views of an investigation into state investment in women‘s feature filmmaking and the researcher‘s own experience as an activist researcher and apprentice scriptwriter. It concludes that, within an analytical creative writing practice, autoethnography‘s accommodation of a single researcher participant‘s shifting roles may help to open space for women scriptwriters to contribute to New Zealand feature films.