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‘Te Taonga – a significant contribution to the Māori screen industry’: Profiling Desray Armstrong, contemporary New Zealand film producer

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posted on 2024-10-13, 21:01 authored by Thomas Boniface-WebbThomas Boniface-Webb
Desray Armstrong is one of the most prolific producers working in the Aotearoa New Zealand screen industry. As a wahine (woman/female) Māori, Armstrong's presence counters the traditional domination of white male screen professionals, yet her aim is to support writers and directors from all backgrounds who have a story to tell. Beginning as a production manager, she worked her way up over a career spanning twenty years, and in December 2021 the New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC) awarded her the Māori Screen Excellence Award. However, Armstrong gained her first producer credit only after employing a non-traditional financing model for the artistically ambitious Stray, which was considered outside the remit of the more commercially minded NZFC. Since Stray, and with the support of the NZFC, she has produced films that are challenging and topical, including the noir thriller Coming Home in the Dark, the family saga Juniper and the social media satire Millie Lies Low. This article demonstrates how the onerous public film funding model in New Zealand and the wider market can affect the ability of filmmakers to tell stories that sit outside the narratives acceptable to New Zealand's pākehā-dominated culture. It exposes the mismatch between Armstrong's view that her work is seen by some, as pākehā focussed and the NZFC's idea of the ‘Māori screen industry’. It concludes that despite the drive toward a more accessible industry, led by the NZFC, filmmakers like Armstrong challenge traditional views about how New Zealand should be represented on screen, choosing to position the story and the storyteller as the chief focus, and not where the story originates from.

History

Preferred citation

Boniface-Webb, T. (2023). ‘Te Taonga – a significant contribution to the Māori screen industry’: Profiling Desray Armstrong, contemporary New Zealand film producer. Media International Australia. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x231183283

Journal title

Media International Australia

Publication date

2023-01-01

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Publication status

Published online

Online publication date

2023-06-27

ISSN

1329-878X

eISSN

2200-467X

Language

en