Maggie_Chen_GR425_Catalog

Escaping the limits society places on women in the film of Jane Campion

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There are some things that are real, that you can see, that you can observe, like the moon, and grass and things. But for ideas to become real, they have to be played on your senses. —Jane Campion

01 Director

02 Film

Festival

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Director Biography

An Angel at My Table

Festival Theme

Filmography

The Piano

Festival Schedule

Film Awards

The Portrait of a Lady

Festival Location

Interviews

Holy Smoke!

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Bright Star

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2009

“Magnificent” THE INDEPENDENT

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Jane Campion

Dame Elizabeth Jane Campion DNZM (born 30 April 1954) is a New Zealand screenwriter, producer, and director. She is the second of five women ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director and the first and only female filmmaker to receive the Palme d’Or, which she received for the acclaimed film The Piano (1993), for which she also won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

Although both her parents were involved in New Zealand theatre, Campion initially chose a different direction, earning a B.A. (1975) in anthropology from the Victoria University of Wellington. She obtained a second degree (1981), in art, from

the Sydney College of the Arts at the University of Sydney in Australia before turning to film. Campion enrolled in the Australian Film, Television and Radio School and made several notable short films while there and afterward. Her first theatrical feature, Sweetie (1989), won notice at the Cannes film festival and was followed by the successful An Angel at My Table, which was based on autobiographies

by Janet Frame. Campion’s subsequent work has tended to polarize opinion. Holy Smoke! (1999) teamed Campion with Harvey Keitel, who as the female lead. Her 2009 film Bright Star was shown at the Cannes Film Festival.

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Filmography

Tissues (1980) Mishaps of Seduction and Conquest (1981) Peel: An Exercise in Discipline (1982) Passionless Moments (1983) A Girl’s Own Story (1984) After Hours (1984) Two Friends (1986) Sweetie (1989)

An Angel at My Table (1990) The Piano(1993) The Portrait of a Lady (1996) Holy Smoke! (1996) After Hours (1999) In the Cut (2003) The Water Diary (2006) Top of the Lake (2013)

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Film Awards

Palme d’Or Grand Jury Prize Academy Award for Writing (Original Screenplay) AACTA Award for Best Direction

AACTA Award for Best Original Screenplay

César Award for Best Foreign Film Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay

1993 • The Piano

1990 • An Angel at My Table

1994 • The Piano

1993 • The Piano

1993 • The Piano

1993/1989 • The Piano/Sweetie

1994 • The Piano

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Film Awards

Independent Spirit Award for Best International Film Grand Jury Prize National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Screenplay New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director AACTA Award for Best Drama Series Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Director Bodil Award for Best Non-American Film

AACTA Award for Best Telefeature or Mini Series

1994 /1992 • The Piano / An Angel at My Table

1994 • The Piano

1993 • The Piano

2017 • Top of the Lake: China Girl

1993 • The Piano

1994 • The Piano

2014 • Top of the Lake

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Film Awards

London Film Critics’ Circle Award for Film of the Year AACTA Awards - Byron Kennedy Award Robert Award for Best Foreign Film Australian Film Institute Award for Best Experimental Film Australian Film Institute Award for Best Direction in a Non-Feature Film Australian Film Institute Award for Best Direction in a Telefeature Australian Film Institute Award for Best Screenplay in a Short Film

1993 • The Piano

1994 • The Piano

1984 • Passionless Moments

1984 • A Girl’s Own Story

1987 • Two Friends

1984 • A Girl’s Own Story

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INTERVIEW WITH JANE CAMPION

By Véronique Le Bris • 03 December 2018 Meeting with Jane Campion Jane Campion was the guest of honor at the Antipodes Festival which took place this last October in Saint Tropez, France. She received an award, the Top of Tasman Award for her entire career, and inaugurated this 20th edition by presenting two films: Peel, for which she received the Palme d’Or short film at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986, and her first feature film Sweetie.

What does this Antipodes Festival represent for you?

My film Holy Smoke was shown in 1999, but I could not be there. It is still a very long trip to Europe from New Zealand.

I try to come given that my career took off in France.

What do you mean?

Pierre Rissient - filmmaker and discoverer of talents who died on May 6, 2018 (editor’s note) - whose memory I saluted at the inauguration, gave me my shot by selecting my graduation film Peel, then Sweetie at the Cannes Festival.

This is how it all began.

You are one of the rare women director to receive awards, such as winning two Palmes d’Or, an Oscar, or awards in Venice, and to be considered by the critics[ECF1] . How does it make you feel?

It makes me uncomfortable. In this world, women’s voices are not given enough importance, though I don’t just blame the film industry or critics for that. This is a problem that goes far beyond the cinema industry, even if our world is far from being spared. When 93% of films are made by men and this percentage has not increased since the beginning of film-making, we cannot remain at ease.

How can this situation be changed?

I think after #metoo, it will no longer be possible to ignore women. We want to hear what they want and what they think! Women are a wealth of the world. “Me” and “too” are the first two words I pronounced as a child. I wanted to have everything my big sister had and I used to say “Me too, me too,” all the time! On a more serious note, I was at the Golden Globes ceremony—hearing these women speak up and demand equality, made me feel like for the first time something was really happening.

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To speak up, to claim, is it enough?

We are facing a historic turning point. And we will never go back. We must work, rush into the now open doors and use this energy to build on. Just do it! Just go for it! On the film sets I worked on lately, we were surprised to see the teams’ gender ratios not mixed enough. This is especially true on television, less in cinema which is a more conservative field.

Are there many female directors in New Zealand?

Probably more than elsewhere. On the other hand, it is men who retain financial power.

You have always claimed a feminine view in your films. Has this complicated the financing for some of them?

Being a woman is very important to me. And I do not want to be bullied or abused because of my sex. But, this is not a claim! I express my sensitivity and it turns out to be feminine.

This has never been a handicap for my producers who have always liked my scripts and found the necessary money for me to do my films.

That is to say?

TV shows such as The Handmaid’s Tale, Big Little Lies or mine, Top of the Lake, all address the complexity of the

relationship between the two sexes and the difference in women’s feelings. They have had success and received awards. I think the public is bored watching works with alpha males. Even men are fed up! If producers continue to ignore the female point of view, they will eventually lose their audience. Which is what matters. This is the right time for women.

You say that writing male characters is not easy for you.

Is this why you collaborate with Gerard Lee? He is my oldest friend and we share the same sense of humor. He is the most surprising and least ambitious person I know. Yet, he is much more “girly” than I am! I struggle to write male roles as they’re usually stemming from patriarchal structures, the same way I am wary of stereotyping female characters.

Would you go so far as to write a movie with a central male character?

Yes, I would, and will. And it will be in my next film. Now that the #meetoo movement has allowed other women to express themselves, I feel more free to put a man at the center of my next film.

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Peel: An Exercise in Discipline

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1982

“Beautiful” FREEDOM LIFE

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Tissues (1980) Mishaps of Seduction and Conquest (1981) Peel: An Exercise in Discipline (1982) Passionless Moments (1983) A Girl’s Own Story (1984) After Hours (1984) Two Friends (1986) Sweetie (1989) An Angel at My Table (1990) The Piano(1993) The Portrait of a Lady (1996) Holy Smoke! (1996) After Hours (1999) In the Cut (2003) The Water Diary (2006) Top of the Lake (2013)

Here is the story of a curly-haired little redhead who grew up to be one of New Zealand’s best authors, after enduring ordeals that would have put most people into a madhouse. The irony is that she was already in the madhouse, misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic, and subjected to more than 200 electroshock treatments even though there was nothing really wrong with her except for shyness and depression.

Janet Frame is today the author of some 20 novels, books of poetry, plays and autobiographies. The first two books were actually written and published while she was in a mental hospital, and it is possible to wonder if the act of writing them saved her life - giving her a place to order her thoughts in the middle of chaos.

Kerry Fox Janet Frame

Jane Campion’s “An Angel at My Table” tells her story in a way that I found strangely engrossing from beginning to end. This is not a hyped-up biopic or a soap opera, but simply the record of a life as lived, beginning in childhood with a talented, dreamy girl whose working-class parents loved her, and continuing to follow her as she was gradually shunted by society into a place that almost killed her. Janet is played in the film by three different actresses (from girlhood through her 20s into her 30s, they are Kerry Fox, Alexia Keogh and Karen Fergusson), who have uncanny physical and personality similarities, and so we get a real sense of a life as it unfolds, as things go wrong and a strong spirit struggles to prevail.

Alexia Keogh Janet Frame as adolescent

Kevin J. Wilson Father

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Tissues (1980) Mishaps of Seduction and Conquest (1981) Peel: An Exercise in Discipline (1982) Passionless Moments (1983) A Girl’s Own Story (1984) After Hours (1984) Two Friends (1986) Sweetie (1989) An Angel at My Table (1990) The Piano(1993) The Portrait of a Lady (1996) Holy Smoke! (1996) After Hours (1999) In the Cut (2003) The Water Diary (2006) Top of the Lake (2013)

Harvey Keitel George Baines In 1993, Jane Campion made history when she became the first woman (and the first New Zealander) to receive the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Her haunting period romance The Piano shared the award with Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine, but in BBC Culture’s critics’ poll of the 100 greatest films by women, Campion doesn’t have to share the prize a second time: The Piano was chosen as the number one film in a remarkable list that showcases more than 100 years of female filmmaking.

Influenced by Jane Mander’s The Story of A New Zealand River as well as the French folktale Bluebeard, Campion’s story is of a Scottish pianist named Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter), an elective mute who is sold off by her father into a marriage with New Zealand frontiersman Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill). She travels to the remote island with her young daughter Flora (Anna Paquin), but after her new husband trades her piano to his friend George Baines (Harvey Keitel), Ada is furious, and resolves to reclaim her beloved instrument through a bargain with the new owner. Romance, jealousy and heartache play out against a lush, unforgiving backdrop of Antipodean forestry and coastline – while Flora desperately searches for the agency and happiness that have so far eluded her.

Sam Neill Alisdair Stewart

Holly Hunter Ada McGrath

Anna Paquin Flora McGrath 25

Tissues (1980) Mishaps of Seduction and Conquest (1981) Peel: An Exercise in Discipline (1982) Passionless Moments (1983) A Girl’s Own Story (1984) After Hours (1984) Two Friends (1986) Sweetie (1989) An Angel at My Table (1990) The Piano(1993) The Portrait of a Lady (1996) Holy Smoke! (1996) After Hours (1999) In the Cut (2003) The Water Diary (2006) Top of the Lake (2013)

Henry James’ masterpiece has long been deemed impossible to translate successfully into film; Jane Campion and screenwriter Laura Jones have, however, produced an adaptation as cinematically intelligent as it is faithful to the original. Beginning, adventurously but wisely, with Isabel Archer (Kidman) rejecting Lord Warburton’s proposal of marriage, the film charts the changes in its young American heroine’s fortunes when, after inheriting a fortune put her way by ailing English cousin Ralph Touchett (Donovan), she travels to Italy, where she’s introduced by her mentor Madame Merle (Hershey) to widowed aesthete Gilbert Osmond (Malkovich). Though a friend advises her to wed a long-time

Nicole Kidman Isabel Archer

admirer who’s followed her from America, and Ralph would prefer her to remain true to her free-spirited ideals, Isabel is tempted by Osmond’s courtship. Besides the uniformly fine performances, what makes the film so rewarding - and challenging - is its refusal to soften or sentimentalise James’ study of New World innocence unprotected against Old World experience. With Stuart Dryburgh’s stunning ‘Scope camerawork, and a number of audaciously imaginative sequences (notably Isabel’s erotic fantasy, and a Dali-esque, b/w ‘silent’ short to evoke her Grand Tour), this is as far from heritage flummery as you can get.

John Malkovich Gilbert Osmond

Barbara Hershey Madame Serena Merle

Mary-Louise Parker Henrietta Stackpole

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Tissues (1980) Mishaps of Seduction and Conquest (1981) Peel: An Exercise in Discipline (1982) Passionless Moments (1983) A Girl’s Own Story (1984) After Hours (1984) Two Friends (1986) Sweetie (1989) An Angel at My Table (1990) The Piano(1993) The Portrait of a Lady (1983) Holy Smoke! (1996) After Hours (1999) In the Cut (2003) The Water Diary (2006) Top of the Lake (2013)

Kate Winslet Ruth “Holy Smoke” begins as a movie about the deprogramming of a cult member and ends with the deprogramming of the deprogrammer. It’s not even a close call.

The cult member is Ruth (Kate Winslet), an Australian who has gone to India and allied herself with a guru. And the deprogrammer is Harvey Keitel, summoned by Ruth’s parents; he stalks off the plane like his no-nonsense fix-it man in “Pulp Fiction” and then starts falling to pieces. The movie leaves us wondering why the guru didn’t become Ruth’s follower, too.

The film isn’t really about cults at all, but about the struggle between men and women, and it’s a little surprising, although not boring, when it turns from a mystic travelogue into a feminist parable. The director is Jane Campion (“The Piano”), who wrote the screenplay with her sister Anna. Like so many Australian films (perhaps even a majority), “Holy Smoke” suggests that everyone in Australia falls somewhere on the spectrum between goofy and eccentric, none more than characters invariably named Mum and Dad. Parents are totally unhinged beneath a facade of middle-class conventionality; their children seem crazy, but like many movie mad people, are secretly saner than anyone else.

Harvey Keitel PJ Waters

Julie Hamilton Mum

Dan Wyllie Robbie 29

A n A n g e l a t M y Ta b l e

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1990

“Sensational” LOVE & DENSTINY

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Festival Theme New Zealand director, producer, and screenwriter Jane Campion is one of contemporary cinema’s most notable filmmakers. She is the first and only female director to receive the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes (1993) and also only the second of four women ever to be nominated as Best Director at the Academy Awards (1994), both for “The Piano”.

“It is this world wide inclusiveness and passion for film at the heart of the festival which makes the importance of Film Festival of Jane Campion indisputable. It is a mythical and exciting festival where amazing things can happen, in Jane Campion’s lens and writing, Campion will explain her character’s experience and destiny for women in society.

Here, Campion not only takes you into a dramatic screen, but a real persona comes to you and allows you to explore their stories throughout the past and the present. Do you see yourself in their stories?

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Schedule

Tissues (1980) Mishaps of Seduction and Conquest (1981) Peel: An Exercise in Discipline (1982) Passionless Moments (1983) A Girl’s Own Story (1984) After Hours (1984) Two Friends (1986) Sweetie (1989) An Angel at My Table (1990) The Piano(1993) The Portrait of a Lady (1996) Holy Smoke! (1996) After Hours (1999) In the Cut (2003) The Water Diary (2006) Top of the Lake (2013)

10:30 am 1:30 pm 4:30 pm 7:30 pm

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Festival Location The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is one of the halls in the Los Angeles Music Center, which is one of the three largest performing arts centers in the United States. The Music Center’s other halls include the Mark Taper Forum, Ahmanson Theatre, and Walt Disney Concert Hall. The 66th Academy Awards ceremony, which honored the best achievements in film in 1993, was held on March 21, 1994 at Los Angeles’ Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Year: 1993 (66th) Academy Awards Category: Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) Film Title: The Piano Winner: Jane Campion Presenter: Jeremy Irons Date & Venue: March 21, 1994; Dorothy Chandler Pavilion The Location: 135 N Grand Ave, Los Angeles, CA

JANE CAMPION: “Well, when I was a student, which doesn’t feel like so very long ago, I used to feel deeply cynical about awards nights like this, but tonight I’m really overwhelmed. In fact I’ve been close to tears a few times. And I’m just very pleased to be here and very proud to win this award. And I’d like to say a very big thank you to my actors: Holly; Anna; Harvey and Sam who aren’t here but were such gorgeous, tender, and vulnerable men in “The Piano.” I’d like to say, Michael Nyman, your music was just so extraordinary. To me it was the heart of the film. Jan, thank you for being my friend and producer. A great big kiss to you, Colin, my husband. And a special thank you to the Miramax brothers, Harvey and Bob, for bringing this film to America. Thank you very much.”

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Bright Star

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2009

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