New Zealand's first Doctor in Creative Writing to graduate

New Zealand's very first Doctor in Creative Writing will graduate from Victoria University next week.

In her PhD thesis, graduand Marian Evans measured New Zealand women's recent participation in feature filmmaking, excluding documentaries, and compared it with men’s participation. She also wrote three screenplays as part of her thesis, one of which she has since developed into a shooting script, Development.

"In my research I found that women wrote and directed only nine percent of New Zealand features between 2003 and 2008."

Ms Evans set out to find out why this was the case. "The problems are the same globally. They are complex, and no-one fully understands them. One local factor that I identified during my research is that the New Zealand Film Commission tends to invest much more in men's projects than in women's, across a range of initiatives. Sometimes this is because fewer women than men apply for funding, but not always."

Ms Evans is now preparing to produce her film Development, which explores some of the same ideas as her PhD research. "Development is a feel-good movie about women in Wellington who want to make movies," she says.

The film experiments with a structure that she hopes other women may also find useful. It involves having a charitable umbrella—the Victoria Foundation—for funding, and ideas used by English director Sally Potter, for her feature film The Gold Diggers, starring Julie Christie and Colette Laffont.

"The core crew are all women," explains Ms Evans.

"Everyone from the actors to the make-up artists will be paid exactly the same. We're delighted with the support we’re getting, from individuals like Jane Campion and Kerry Prendergast, as well as from women's groups and commercial entities."

The film will be available primarily as a free download online.

A unique feature of the PhD in Creative Writing is that it consists of both a creative and a critical component. PhD students have two supervisors. The primary supervisor is a member of the staff of the International Institute of Modern Letters, and the co-supervisor is usually from an academic school or department outside the Institute. As well as the supervision of Director of Scriptwriting Ken Duncum, Ms Evans' secondary supervisor was School of Gender and Women's Studies Senior Lecturer Dr Lesley Hall.

Bill Manhire, who directs the creative writing programme, says, "We're very fortunate that Victoria has such strengths in both traditional scholarship and the creative disciplines. It’s also impressive to see how generous the writers are in their support for one another."

Ms Evans says she misses the PhD meetings at the Institute. "It's been a privilege to listen to Bill and to the others in the PhD group, and to read the group's work."

"I was amazed by the richness and diversity of the other students' topics and by the skills they brought to the work, and at the end of our group sessions I always felt enormously happy and totally excited."

Marian Evans is a cultural activist, member of the Spiral Collective that published Keri Hulme's Booker Prize-winning novel The Bone People. She is also the recipient of an Orangi Kaupapa Award, and an Embassy Trust Prize for her MA feature script, Mothersongs/Chansons maternelles. She completed her PhD with the help of a Women in Leadership PhD Scholarship, funded in memory of filmmaker Di Oliver-Zahl.