Director Biography – Ashley Williams (SUPER SPECIAL)

Director Statement

Kia ora!

I’m Ash, I’m from Wellywood (Wellington, NZ).

My films are gritty, real, soulful and show hope. My work is contemporary and focusing on the ‘coming of age’ genre/YA films, often a mix of drama, fantasy and in-between. They bend genre, and I aim to leave my audience with something to think about. To take away. My purpose being; to make films with meaning.

I use strong female leads and where authentic- under represented cultures in my work. I feel passionate about using film as a medium to speak about important issues or events or unheard voices. I believe film is able to capture our Zeitgeist- or mirror our time, as well as offering a future Zeitgeist. Now isn’t that exciting! I believe that future world is a world that needs love, compassion and hope.

By femalefilmfestival

The irony of this festival is that its goal is to not be around in 5 years time. To eventually not be relevant because there is zero need to have a festival geared for female talent and female stories because the stories presented in Hollywood and around the world are a balanced showcase of the human experience from both sexes. Our goal is to achieve a lot of success and then fold into oblivion simply because there is no need for this festival. This festival was created by the FEEDBACK Film & Writing Festival as a simple reaction to a strong need to showcase female talent from around the world in a more profound way. When putting together the weekly festival, the administration noticed a lack of a female presence in the stories being shown at the festival. A classic example and analogy to the frustration is how the festival noticed that even the smaller roles in a screenplay were written for a man to play. There was zero reason for this in many stories. How a police officer, or a political campaign manager, for example with 3-4 lines in a screenplay was a "HE" character. Why? And these are the screenplays written by the winners! The talented one who have obtained agents and have began/beginning their careers as a writer.

Leave a comment

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: