The Bookshop followed by live Skype Q&A/discussion with Isabel Coixet (online later!)

Isabel Coixet

Isabel Coixet is a prolific Spanish filmmaker whose work as a writer/director and often as her own camera operator includes award-winning features, documentaries and commercials. Her personal work has complex women protagonists and often incorporates human rights themes. She was a good friend of John Berger whose writing revolutionised ideas about looking at and portraying women.

The Bookshop is Isabel’s most recent work. She is now in post-production on Elisa y Marcela, for Netflix, about two women who attempt to marry at the beginning of the twentieth century. Isabel is also a member of Spain’s powerful group of activist women directors and president of the influential European Women’s Audiovisual Network.

#directedbywomen #aotearoa is a Suffrage125 project organised by Marian Evans with lots of great help, it’s an extension of her decade-long research into gender equity and women’s filmmaking, and aims to raise awareness of and increase audiences for screen works that women direct. It will present pop-up events in Auckland and Wellington between September-November. 

Of all feature films produced in Aotearoa between 2003-2016, around 80% were directed by men; and of taxpayer-funded features during this period, only 6.5% were written and directed by women and had female protagonists. Women participate more fully in documentary-making; in the last three years, the proportion of NZOA-funded documentaries directed by women fluctuated between 36-46%, though how many of these were about women and girls is unmeasured. Distribution of films that diverse women make is a further, global, problem.

Isabel Coixet on set with cast