Worthy mentor for worthy cause

NZ filmmaker Christine Rogers helped a group of Broadmeadows Secondary School (Melbourne) students make the short film By the Light of the Moon. The film tells the stories of two refugees who have settled in Australia, and was written, produced, acted, and filmed entirely by the students. “The school has a lot of children from the Middle East, Iran and Iraq,” says Rogers, a sessional teacher in media at Victoria’s RMIT. “I think telling these stories verifies them and makes them important. When you come to a strange place and none of the stories on TV reflect your reality, I imagine that’s very strange.” On her role as a NZ filmmaker she is equally eloquent: “When you’re in NZ you feel like you’re falling off the end of the world. There’s this incredible sense of cultural isolation. And I think that that’s made NZ artists strive harder to find their own voice – you see it with novelists, painters, poets, artists of all sorts.”