Two and a half weeks out, the speaker and session info continues to flow from this year’s BSS.
Six people were named on Monday, including Filipina writer-director Cathy Garcia-Sampana, whose Hello, Love, Again became the highest-grossing Filipino film in history.
Garcia-Sampana will talk about how an understanding of cultural values, aspirations and everyday relationships has informed her approach to filmmaking. She’ll reflect on what audiences respond to, how those responses evolve over time, and how cultural insight shapes both creative and commercial decision-making. The session will explore relationships with audiences, and the idea that enduring success emerges from the relationship filmmakers cultivate with the people they serve.
Writers Dianne Taylor (After the Party, Dustfall) and Briar Grace-Smith (Cousins, Rūrangi) will explore the relationship between craft and process. Drawing on their experience across television and feature film, they reflect on how creative methodologies evolve, and what remains constant when everything else changes.
Delightful creative discoveries come in moments of pure play, but this can often sit uneasily alongside the realities of funding deadlines, commissioning expectations, development structures and production deliverables. The NZ Comedy Trust presents a case study with Guy Montgomery, Bailey Poching, and Jackie Van Beek on how to take a small, funny idea and develop it into a meaningful comedy screen project without losing the sense of frivolity, experimentation and risk that made it compelling in the first place.
