Chelsea Winstanley on producing mana enhancing movies and redefining success

Chelsea Winstanley received the NZ Film and Television Mana Wāhine Award in 2015. Seven years on, each challenge this wahine Māori film-maker touches is mana enhancing, Angela Barnett discovers.

When you google photos of Chelsea Winstanley (Ngāti Ranginui and Ngāi Te Rangi) you might be bombarded with photos of Hollywood! Glam! Red carpets! The Oscars! Frocks! Celebs! And these partitions with logos throughout them that solely A-listers get requested to face in entrance of.

But it’s only a second in time, in line with this gifted film-maker.

Yes, the 46-year-old lived and labored in Los Angeles for some time. Yes, the producer and director was nominated for Best Picture on the 2019 Oscars for Jojo Rabbit (though extra importantly, was the primary indigenous girl to be nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award).

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Yes, this wahine who grew up in Mount Maunganui, received the Grand Prix Jury Prize on the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival for the anthology Waru, alongside eight different gifted wāhine Māori film-makers.

Yes, the mom of three, has labored with Disney creating te reo Māori variations of Moana and is now set to launch Lion King and Frozen. And sure, she’s worn designer frocks by Kiri Nathan and others.

“But,” she says, wearing a singlet prepared for yoga, at her residence in Tāmaki Makaurau, “The thing about Hollywood and even the Oscars is, it’s a business, and when you understand that you understand the culture and the film industry at large. It is not reflective of reality, and it helps to understand how fabricated it can be”.

I’m speaking to Winstanley over Zoom in her residence workplace. Just as our kōrero begins, her youngest daughter Matewa struts in, in cowboy boots with a pink glittery heel and a smile that may soften ice cream; the colorful lifetime of a mom.

Changing the sport

When Winstanley first began out as a film-maker, after graduating prime of her class at AUT, she thought she would solely direct documentaries.

“All I wanted to do was get behind the camera and make the thing. I love capturing stories. Watching Mereta’s [Mita] films like Bastion Point and Patu! I thought, ‘that’s what I wanted to be!’ But during my first job at Kiwa [Productions], I fell into producing because one of the producers left to have a baby. Sometimes I’ve wrestled with it, thinking, damn, I missed out on my director trajectory, but I’m at peace with that now because producing helps me understand how to be a better director.”

One of her latest producing coups was getting the movie, Merata: How Mum Decolonised The Screen, in regards to the mighty Merata Mita – a film-maker each Kiwi ought to have fun – onto Netflix. The movie is directed by Merata’s son, Hepi Mita, and produced by Winstanley alongside Cliff Curtis and Te Arepa Kahi.

“As a producer, I was thinking ‘what’s the best thing I could do to make sure Hepi’s mum’s story never gets buried’. I had heard of [film-maker] Ava DuVernay. She started her career as a publicist and when she started making films as a director, no-one would distribute her. She’s a black woman. So she started distributing them herself – and now she’s this powerhouse, who supports women, people of colour, minorities, all denominations. She was the only person I could see who would take care of this film, I knew I had to get a screener to her.”

Merata Mita was a mentor to Winstanley and taught her the significance of story sovereignty – controlling the story from script to display screen – and Winstanley was capable of announce DuVernay’s distribution at Sundance in 2019.

“As a producer, despite the success of JoJo Rabbit, I would say that moment thus far in my producing career would be the highlight. I have hope when I see people like Ava changing the game for women to participate in the whole process of film-making.”

‘For me, that’s freedom’

There’s been a lot of recognition for Winstanley’s movies, receiving gongs for a lot of initiatives together with What We Do In The Shadows, Jojo Rabbit, Waru, Meathead, and Night Shift. But perceived success, like Hollywood photos and the Oscars, solely exhibits the shiny components.

She’s additionally had her share of curveballs thrown her method. She’s talked brazenly about childhood trauma: abuse and her dad and mom separating when she was 7. Being a younger solo mom at 23, and attending college full time, solely to endure a horrific automobile accident that left her unable to stroll for six months.

She misplaced her mentor, Merata, who collapsed proper outdoors Māori Television after they had been engaged on a movie collectively Saving Grace, Te Whakarauora Tangata and Winstanley needed to full it with out her. “It wasn’t my story to complete,” she says. Yet her outlook is as contemporary and grounded as her storytelling.

“Only recently I’ve learned to look at these things in life as soul-progressing lessons. When I was younger, I thought what the hell! Because you’re trapped in the trauma. You don’t understand these things are about helping you grow to become the better version of yourself. Now, I put myself in the present, it’s about what I have. For me, that’s freedom. Freedom from my own thoughts about not being adequate enough, freedom about having my own choices on love, or freedom to pursue whatever dream I want without being afraid that I won’t be good enough to achieve it. I’ve done a lot of work on forgiveness and when I think about those curveballs, I acknowledge the choices I’ve made to put myself in those moments.

“I’m accepting of what I have chosen in life. It’s easy to go for the victim angle ‘why did that happen to me’ but I put myself in that situation, so what did I learn? Now I think, ‘thank you for all of it because it’s enabled me to fulfil my true purpose and love myself even further’ but more than that, ‘Thank you, because I will never put myself in harm’s way again’. I often think about the choices we make as women, sometimes getting into situations either out of fear or out of not believing we deserve more, and we’re accepting of behaviour we wouldn’t give ourselves. Right now, hand on heart, I’m the happiest version of myself I’ve ever been. Because I’ve been working on freedom and forgiveness.”

‘Nothing about us without us’

After varied courses studying te reo Māori – night time classes at AUT and a weekly course at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa – Winstanley’s began full immersion rūmaki reo this 12 months. “I think this is the tipping point. I’m starting to feel te reo Māori in a different way, it is full time and the tikanga (culture) goes side by side, you can’t have one without the other.”

“I truly believe this country could be wonderful if te ao Māori [a Māori worldview], was front and centre. As people living in Aotearoa, we need to get our heads around the fact that there’s a wealth of knowledge already here and it is beautiful, people around the world could gain a lot from indigenous cultures.”

Her newest movie, Night Raiders, is a celebration of indigenous tradition and film-making. Winstanley has produced the Canadian/New Zealand co-production alongside different Māori producers Ainsley Gardiner and govt producer (and Winstanley’s former husband) Taika Waititi, whereas Saskatchewan-born Danis Goulet, who’s Cree-Métis [Indigenous Canadian] directs.

The sci-fi thriller is ready in 2043 the place kids are property of the state in post-war North America. There’s additionally a lethal virus. “The craziest thing is, Danis made this film before the pandemic and before all those cases of the residential schools had come out in Canada,” she says.

In 2021, the stays of 215 Indigenous kids had been found on the website of a former college in British Columbia. More than 1300 graves have been discovered throughout Canada. The state-sponsored college system was aimed toward eradicating languages and tradition of the Indigenous populations.

Goulet takes horrible affected by the previous, the taking of kids from their households and tradition, and weaves it right into a not-so-distant dystopian future. And the primary Cree character, Niska, has uncommon and much-needed expertise to stay off the land and thrive.

“One of the things I love about what Danis shows in the film,” says Winstanley, “in terms of colonisation, is that indigenous people were not meant to survive. They were meant to be annihilated. And we’re still here, and we will be in the future. And guess what? You’ll be needing us more than we need you!”

Being on set was a transferring expertise, says Winstanley. “It was beautiful seeing the synergy of our cultures. When we were filming the residential school scenes, because it was such an intense subject matter, with all that mamae [hurt] they had a smudging ceremony before we started that block of filming. It allowed everyone on set to acknowledge the gravitas of what was about to be reimagined.”

Her hope for indigenous storytelling, and all storytelling is that “there will be nothing about us without us”.

Winstanley’s now a part of the Producers Branch of the Academy (Oscars) plus the not too long ago fashioned Indigenous Alliance Group.

“We had our first meeting recently and Danis was talking about the path to the Oscars and how much representation matters, when there are only a few indigenous Academy voting members your view or choices can easily be drowned out by the majority of non-indigenous voices who have never had a relationship to an indigenous story because the history of cinema has traditionally left us out, or told stories about us rather than with us. Often that representation is wrong or romanticised, or worse still, made palatable and so when members see something that is a truthful representation they don’t know how to respond. It’s important we engage with the voting membership more than ever.”

If success is having the ability to discover the trail to inform the tales you care about in a method that respects all these concerned, then Winstanley is successful. And regardless that she’s received them, she doesn’t want shiny awards to show it.

Night Raiders is in cinemas Thursday March twenty fourth.