Where We Come From: The Writers' Journey

This live panel explores the parallel evolution of screenwriters and the New Zealand Writers Guild over five decades, set against enormous regulatory, political, technological and social change.

From a pre-deregulation broadcasting landscape to global streaming platforms.
From government reform to the Screen Industry Workers Act.
From three channels and a shared national moment to algorithm-driven micro-audiences.

How have screenwriters in Aotearoa navigated it all?

This conversation brings together practitioners, critics and academics to examine not just the stories we’ve told, but the conditions under which we’ve told them.

How do we tell stories for screen in Aotearoa New Zealand?
What has changed in who gets to tell them?
How have funding structures, regulation and industrial frameworks shaped what reaches the screen?
What happens to national storytelling in an era of global platforms?
And how do we write for audiences who no longer gather in the same room at the same time?

Film and television do more than entertain. They reflect and refract us. Over fifty years, our screen stories have captured our politics, our tensions, our humour, our identity and our contradictions.

So how are we doing?
Are we telling ourselves the truth?
Are we keeping pace with the technology that delivers our work?
Are audiences changing faster than we are?
And what does the next fifty years demand of writers?

This is not a nostalgia panel. It is a stocktake. A reckoning. And a forward look.

Join us live in Wellington as we trace the writers’ journey through reform, risk, resilience and reinvention.

Because no screen story begins without a writer.

And no industry survives without understanding where it has come from.

Panellists:

Dave Armstrong - Playwright and screenwriter whose work ranges from sketch comedy and Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby to drama such as Hope and Wire, and who teaches television writing at the IIML.

Dr Trisha Dunleavy - Associate Professor at Victoria University and one of the New Zealand's leading researchers into television drama and screen industries.

Whetū Fala - Māori language storyteller with Pasifika heritage. A producer, director, writer, whose work spans television drama, documentary and digital storytelling focused on indigenous perspectives.

John Smythe - Writer, actor, critic, graduate of NIDA (acting) and AFTRS (screenwriting), and former NZWG National President who helped reunify the Guild in the 1980s and has long documented New Zealand theatre.

Rosie Howells - Screenwriter and director working predominantly in comedy, genre, and animation

Moderated by: Alice Shearman, NZWG Executive Director

Wednesday 18 March, 7pm - 9pm

The Cinema at Massey University, National Academy of Screen Arts in Wellington.

Block 10, Buckle Street, Wellington.
Enter through Entrance D from Tory Street, heading up through Pukeahu Park.

VIDEO: How to find the cinema HERE

HINT: Find the large double doors, east side of the Former Dominion Museum building.

Contact the host of Where We Come From: The Writers' Journey - WELLINGTON