background

Drama this morning. I’m with a friend of mine, in Hamilton (1/5 hours south of my home in Auckland) for her radiation treatment. We turned up this morning at the hospital were put in a room while prison guards and police searching for a runaway prisoner in the roof of the h>>12/14/2011

BIO


PRODUCER/ DIRECTOR

“I felt I was in the hands of a master storyteller.” Still in Motion magazine

Pietra Brettkelly

I am truly passionate about everything I do – the risks I’ve taken in making some of my documentaries exhibit either passion or craziness.  I have always been excited by stories that matter, the personal journeys that reflect a bigger issue – my Irish heritage has not only given me redhair but also a thirst for story-telling.

With parents that took me everywhere from Papua New Guinea to Portugal, they encouraged a wonder and appreciation for the diversity of peoples and their stories.

“Pietra Brettkelly’s engimatic rendering … is not a straightforward artist’s profile, political commentary or domestic drama, but a poetic fusion of the three.” Peter Debruge, Variety

My self-funded 2008 Sundance Film Festival award-winning documentary ‘the art star and the sudanese twins’ enjoyed international success in competition at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Hotdocs, Toronto, Zurich International Film Festival, the Melbourne International Film Festival and Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival.

The film has won the following awards:

  • Best Editing Sundance Film Festival
  • Qantas Film and Television Best Documentary Director
  • Qantas Film and Television Best Festival Documentary
  • Best Director, EIDF Seoul Korea
  • Best Documentary Whistler Film Festival, Canada,
  • Special Jury Prize Zurich Film Festival, Switzerland

I am also the 2010 recipient of the New Zealand Film Commission Producer’s Award, and currently attending the Binger Doc Lab, Amsterdam.

In 2003 my film ‘Beauty Will Save the World’ took me to Libya for that country’s first ever beauty pageant and an interview with the “mad dog of the Middle East” Colonel Muammar Ghadaffi.  The film premiered at the American Film Institute Film Festival in Los Angeles and later at Hot Docs International Documentary Festival, Toronto and IDFA in Amsterdam.

My films have a considered quietness to them, a non-judgemental approach that allows subjects to tell their stories.  I treasure the honesty and the privilege people grant me in capturing and documenting an often pivotal time in their lives.