Zia Mandviwalla won an award for Best Script in the Short Film category at the recent New Zealand Screen Awards. Here she discusses the perils and high points in the life of an emerging filmmaker. Courtesy of NZ Screen Directors Guild Magazine Take - Issue 39.

It has been raining for three days straight. It's a funny time of year for me at the moment... Zia Mandviwalla won an award for Best Script in the Short Film category at the recent New Zealand Screen Awards. Here she discusses the perils and high points in the life of an emerging filmmaker. Courtesy of NZ Screen Directors Guild Magazine Take - Issue 39.

It has been raining for three days straight. It's a funny time of year for me at the moment...We're in-between seasons, tax returns loom and I'm annoyed with myself for playing the waiting game - waiting for funding, waiting for phone calls to be returned, waiting to hear back from festivals, waiting (and hoping mightily with all fingers crossed) for the next gig to happen.

I have been making films for about four years now. After graduating from university, I worked in a kitchen (as most BA graduates do) and did a part-time script writing course. When everybody else went to film school, I decided to buy a camera and computer and started making films in my bedroom - a gamble, which could be either a stroke of genius or incredibly stupid - I'm yet to find out. Not going to film school often makes me feel like I'm groping in darkness, not really knowing if I'm 'doing it right' or not. Yet at the same time, when you know nothing, you have nothing to lose. It is an incredible freedom - you push boundaries and defy conventions because you are unaware of their existence. Most of all you remain true to yourself, because you have nothing else to fall back on.

Last year I finished my first funded short film in October, which went to two A-list festivals in November and is, as I write, in competition at a short film festival in Spain. So I figure, film school or not, something must have gone right.
But right now, it feels like nothing's happening. I still wonder how I ended up wanting to make films. I've never been a great photographer. I grew up in a Middle Eastern country where there wasn't an English-speaking cinema until I was eighteen. Even then, films were heavily censored and the only videos we had access to were pirated. Every so often you'd be reminded of this when the small silhouette of a person got up and edged across frame towards the exit.
I have, however, always been interested in the lives of others and am a chronic people-watcher. For me cinema is the most gratifying medium of storytelling available. It engages so many of the senses and it can be so penetrative and influential in people's lives. A good film is a powerful story and a powerful story stays with people and haunts them. I think it is such a privilege and a humbling experience to be able to seat people in a darkened room, where the only light omitted comes from the story you're telling.

Yet this constantly feels like a world of contradictions to me. There is either feast or famine and nothing in-between. You're either rolling in money, particularly when grants come in, or you're living on brown rice and soy sauce.
While I have no desire to add to the wailing masses of financially challenged young filmmakers, I was highly amused by the paradox of travelling to overseas festivals. To be flown half-way across the world, put up in a four-star hotel, walk on a red carpet, drink until the early hours of the morning with dodgy Polish producers and husky-voiced Israeli feminist directors (and other exotic members of the species) is so very glamorous. Yet returning to your hotel room every night and downing bowls of two-minute noodles because you can't afford anything from the room service menu is the other reality. And you are not the only filmmaker there doing this!

Of course, there is also that little game time seems to play with filmmakers. Time either stretches before you like a boringly flat, barren desert with not even a mirage in sight. Then you blink, and all of a sudden pre-production is over and you're walking up to your first shoot day, overwhelmed by the size of the lighting truck, and meekly telling the third AD that you're the director and if she by any chance knows where the producer is. It is on those days that you long for 24 to turn into 36 hours and for the human body to become resilient to sleep deprivation.

On those days, ironically you long to be back in the uneventful desert. However, I find that state of 'nothing's happening' the hardest part of filmmaking - its when you have the time to ponder the precariousness of your own existence and wonder if you're just pursuing a glorified hobby - and if you'll ever get another gig.

However, I remain continually in awe of how, when the ball gets rolling the universe aligns and provides. When you put the word out that you require the most obscure thing in the world (like two English-fluent, middle-aged Korean actors, one of whom can swim and doesn't mind prolonged periods underwater) that very thing appears. And how, on no money, much aroha and a few bottles of wine, people come to your party, work tremendously long days, give you their blood and sweat (while watching your tears) and make a film. It is astounding and never ceases to amaze me how much can be achieved when humans are passionate.

I keep looking over my shoulder wondering when someone's going to tell me to cut my hair and get a real job. But it hasn't happened yet. Truth be told, I don't really feel I have skills in any other area anymore (my flat whites aren't what they used to be), so this filmmaking thing better work. But I've learnt skills many 'real jobs' could never impart: self-reliance, bravery, believing in yourself even when you don't, knowing when to listen to your gut, sticking to your guns, and in the face of financial adversity, making stuff happen.

So I know, as I watch the rain, and wallow in my own self-inflicted state of pained waiting, that once the rain stops I'll have to get up off my chair and shamelessly hunt down those non-returners of phone calls. That I will have to actively chant mantras to will more festival entries into my life and regardless of whether the funding happens or not, that against all the odds, I will make my film.