NZ On Screen Launches The Gaylene Preston Collection

NZ On Screen celebrates the extensive career of trailblazing writer, director and producer Dame Gaylene Preston with the launch of The Gaylene Preston Collection.

Traversing more than 40 years of Preston’s award-winning screen career, The Gaylene Preston Collection contains over 40 titles including short films, television, home movies, interviews and 16 of her feature films and documentaries in full length. Alongside this rich offering are written backgrounders from cinematographer and frequent collaborator Alun Bollinger, film reviewer and entertainment reporter Kate Rodger, and Preston’s personal assistant, archivist (and poet) Danny Bultitude. These testaments to Preston’s talent as a filmmaker add another layer of understanding to her influential body of work. An excerpt from Dame Gaylene Preston’s forthcoming memoir Gaylene’s Take: Her Life in New Zealand Film also joins the backgrounders in the collection.

Bultitude, who has been working with Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision over the past two years to archive and preserve Preston’s works — many of which you’ll find in the NZ On Screen collection — comments on her contribution to New Zealand’s screen industry in his backgrounder; “Like a well-thumbed book, the story of New Zealand film will indelibly be covered in Gaylene’s fingerprints, creased at the points where only she applied pressure. From the non-narrative documentary of Learning Fast and Making Utu, to the feminist thrills of movies Mr Wrong and Perfect Strangers, to the fascinating hybrids that are Hold Up and Home By Christmas; Gaylene goes where others fear to tread, and then she stomps hard.”

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