Screentalk

Lindsay Shelton's career testifies to his love of communicating, and his love of film. After working in newspapers he began a decade programming the Wellington Film Festival, while working in television news. In 1979 he joined the New Zealand Film Commission: over the next 22 years he was an enthusiastic promoter and salesman for New Zealand film around the globe. 

In this ScreenTalk interview, Shelton talks about:

• Getting pulled into the new medium of television, from a globetrotting newspaper career
• Campaigning to sell films for the New Zealand Film Commission
• The golden days of Kiwi movies first breaking into overseas markets: Goodbye Pork Pie, then selling Sleeping Dogs and Smash Palace to the United States
• How the world was discovering New Zealand as a hothouse of new and exciting talent
• Shelton's longheldbelief that the best way to promote New Zealand films is by country rather than genre
• How without the NZ Film Commission there would be no local film industry
• The "wonderful" but stressful story of how Shelton persuaded Jane Campion to turn An Angel at My Table into a movie
• Stunned reactions to the first international screening of Once Were Warriors, at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival

This video is available on YouTube to embed and distribute via a Creative Commons licence.