Pounui Cameron’s New Pandora

“It was ultimately New Zealand’s contemporary film culture that persuaded [American filmmaker-adventurer] James Cameron to shift his work life, in stages, toward the Southern Hemisphere,” Pete Nikolaison writes for The New York Times. “New Zealand film crews, he said, have a freshness and flexibility he no longer finds in the United States. ‘They aren’t the sort of third-generation people you find working on soundstages in a very jaded Los Angeles,’ Cameron said. Cameron has spent an estimated $20 million to buy 1100 hectares of farmland around Lake Pounui. He arrives with the promise of not just an outsider’s eye but also a new national brand and a next wave of employment for hundreds of New Zealanders who are expected to work on Avatar 2 and Avatar 3.”


Tags: Avatar  film industry  James Cameron  Lake Pounui  New York Times (The)  

Amy Brown’s New Novel Inspired by Women and Art

Amy Brown’s New Novel Inspired by Women and Art

Like many writers before her, New Zealand-born Amy Brown takes inspiration from the Australian feminist icon Stella Maria Miles Franklin in her captivating debut novel My Brilliant Sister – but instead…