Filmmaker
Biography
Gaylene Preston - FilmmakerGaylene Preston is a longtime advocate of the importance of telling New Zealand stories. Her films identify with ordinary people whose stories are not normally given space on the big screen. Her dramatic features, as well as her many documentaries, combine entertainment with a strong social message.
After three years studying at Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury Gaylene travelled to England in 1967. While there she worked with psychiatric patients using art and drama in therapy. Her first films, made abroad, grew out of this therapy work with institutionalised patients. Gaylene returned to New Zealand in 1977 and, like many other successful independent New Zealand film makers, began working for John O'Shea at Pacific Films where she was employed as Art Director. Her employment at Pacific Films lasted only six months before she was made redundant. The industry was in the doldrums. Undeterred, she produced and directed with Warrick Attewell her first independent documentary All the Way Up There which became the short for John Reid's Middle Age Spread and subsequently her independent work thrived.
Gaylene has served on the Executive of the Independent Producers and Directors Guild, the Board of the New Zealand Film Commission and The New Zealand Film Archive - in addition to raising a family and making films.
Gaylene's filmography includes short dramas, experimental films, feature films, telefeatures and mini series, commercials and documentaries. Films include: Perfect Strangers, War Stories, Bread and Roses, Ruby and Rata and Mr Wrong. Documentaries include: Lovely RITA, the TIME of our LIVES, Earthquake! Coffee, Tea or Me? Titless Wonders, Getting to Our Place, Home Tuwhare, War Stories, KaiPurakau, Lands of Our Fathers, Punitive Damage and Home by Christmas.
Her award winning work has screened extensively at international festivals including Venice, Sundance, Toronto, London, Chicago, Sydney, Melbourne and New Zealand, becoming popular New Zealand classics.
Gaylene's latest project is the feature film Home by Christmas is set in the 1940s. Based on the stories of her father, the film is an account of one soldier's experience of WWII, and the family he left behind in New Zealand. Home by Christmas made it to #15 on the New Zealand Box Office top grossing films of all time, having made over $1million since its release in April 2010.
The New Zealand Film Archive holds viewing copies of many of Gaylene's films as well as a collection of material that has been written about her. Anyone wanting access to this material should contact Archive staff.
For more information visit Gaylene's website, www.gaylenepreston.com.
"At all costs, resist the temptation to see this [Home by Chrismas] as a dry and worthy war history. What Preston has done here is capture the essence of her generation's experience of their parents and distilled it into a film that every New Zealander should see. She's based the film on audio interviews she conducted with her dying father several years before War Stories was made. In those, he was tellingly discreet in case Tui heard them after he had gone, but in this filmed version his evasiveness becomes profoundly expressive.
Much of that is down to a brilliant performance by Barry who enacts Eddie's reminiscences with an eerily precise authenticity. Bringing impromptu speech to life is a task that eludes the best of actors, but Barry delivers a masterclass, not reciting from a script but somehow inhaling the essence of what Eddie said and becoming a complete character of plausibility and conviction. The fact that he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer adds another level of resonance to a story full of piercing ironies.
The interviews are seamlessly interwoven with archive footage and dramatisations in which Henderson and Preston-Crayford, the director's daughter, play her parents.
It's a heady mix but the result is a small miracle of a film, a triumphant marriage of form and content and an instant classic. I cannot recommend it too highly."
Peter Calder, New Zealand Herald,Thursday, 29 April 2010
