April 30 - Jane Campion

Happy 66th Birthday, Jane Campion! Born today in 1954 as Elizabeth Jane Campion, this New Zealand screenwriter, producer and director is the second of five women ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director. 

  

She is also the first and only filmmaker to receive the Palme d'Or, which she received for her acclaimed  for her best known film, being the 1993 New Zealand period drama/romance film 'The Piano'. 

  

After a long voyage from Scotland, pianist Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter) and her young daughter, Flora (Anna Paquin), are left with all their belongings, including a piano, on a New Zealand beach.  

  

Ada, who has been mute since childhood, has been sold into marriage to a local man named Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill). 

Making little attempt to warm up to Alisdair, Ada soon becomes intrigued by his Maori-friendly acquaintance, George Baines (Harvey Keitel), leading to tense, life-altering conflicts. 

  

For the film, Campion also won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay at the 66th Academy Awards in late March 1994. 

  

According to Campion's personal life, in 1992, she married Australian Colin David Englert, who had worked as a second unit director on 'The Piano'. Their first child, a son named Jasper, was born in 1993 but lived for only twelve days.  

  

Their second child, a daughter Alice Englert, was born on June 15, 1994; she is an Australian actress. However, Campion and Englert couple divorced in 2001. 

  

From the beginning of her career, Campion's work has received high praise from critics all around. 

  

In the 2016 New Year Honours, for services to film, Campion was appointed a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. 

  

In American author and professor V.W. Wexman's Jane Campion: Interviews, British film critic and historian David Thomson describes Campion "as one of the best young directors in the world today."  

  

Similarly, Australian author and senior lecturer in Creative Writing Sue Gillett wrote an article for Senses of Cinema in 1999 entitled "More Than Meets The Eye: The Mediation of Affects in Jane Campion's 'Sweetie'". 

  

In it, she describes Campion's work as "perhaps the fullest and truest way of being faithful to the reality of experience"; by utilizing the "unsayable" and "unseeable," she manages to catalyze audience speculation.  

  

Campion's films tend to gravitate around themes of gender politics, such as seduction and female sexual power. This has led some to label Campion's body of work as feminist.  

  

However, Brooklyn-based freelance food and culture critic Rebecca Flint Marx argues, "while not inaccurate, [the feminist label] fails to fully capture the dilemmas of her characters and the depth of her work." 

  

Campion has been active from 1983–present. 

  

#borntodirect 

@jane_campion 

@WomenInFilm 

@NZFilmCommish 

@SensesofCinema 

@Britannica