I’m terribly proud of my friend Ana Kokkinos’s new film of The Book of Revelation. Actually, I haven’t seen it yet, because it hasn’t arrived in NZ, but it has been invited to Toronto Film Festival and premiered in Melbourne Film Fest last month. I’m proud anyway – of her.
It was always going to be a tough and dark film, challenging audiences and critics, as did Rupert Thomson’s novel. She’s a brave, thoughtful and insightful film-maker.
But I delight most in the fact that she made herself into a film-maker, at a ripe old age (I can’t remember, exactly, it seems so long ago – in her late 30s, I suppose) after years as a lawyer, and her partner Mira also leaped from paid work tilting at windmills to starving in a writers’ garret. Well, almost. They both took a risk, and began to do what they most wanted to do.
It would be enough if they were making a living and producing anything – that they are both writing, and in Ana’s case directing, varied and remarkable films is a wonderful, inspiring thing. But then they are both wonderful inspiring things, and always have been.
Salute.

You can watch a few clips and an interview with Ana from the ABC’s At The Movies show here.