N.Z. film wins award at U.S. festival

Press, 23 November 1981, Page 13

N.Z. film wins award at U.S. festival

PA Wellington“The Monster’s Christmas," a one-hour children’s film, has won a bronze medal at the New York film and television festival for its Wellington maker, Gibson Film Productions. The star of the film is a Wellington girl, Lucy McGrath, aged nine. “The Monster’s Christmas" is her second film. Fifteen months ago she was working in “Black Hearted Barney Blackfoot,” also made by Gibson Films. "I don’t think she has any great ambitions. She just enjoys it, and if she was asked to" do more, she would,” said her mother. Mrs Christine McGrath. Mrs McGrath said her daughter’s drama training had comprised a school holiday drama programme at Wellington High School, “where she had to pretend to be things like spaghetti.’

Gibson Films looked to local schools before they made “Barney Blackfoot” and remembered Lucy McGrath when it decided to make “The Monster’s Christmas.” She still had to audition with 150 others.

“She’s an amazing little girl,” said David Gibson, who

produced the film. “She had to do some fairly amazing things. She had to climb up high ladders in caves and up a rope ladder by a waterfall. She was not too fazed. Sometimes we worked from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. She coped with that, too,” he said. Mrs McGrath, who went along * when the film was being shot in scenic places last February, said Lucy had been lucky to love reading. “In the minutes and hours between filming, she read. Sometimes she had to be awakened. But she did enjoy it. She is not a precocious child and 1 don’t think the experience has changed her,” Mrs McGrath said. New Zealanders will be able to see the film on television on Christmas Day. They will see Lucy journeying towards the caves, where the wicked witch, Festindook, lives, to help the film’s monsters regain their stolen voices.

“The Monster’s Christmas” is the second of Gibson Productions’ films to win a bronze medal at the New York festival. The other was “Hunchin’ Down the Track,” a film with a rodeo theme. Two National Film Unit productions also won awards

at this year’s festival. “ Primeval Survivors,” a 12-min-ute documentary on the tuatara and the Stephens Island wildlife sanctuary in the Marlborough Sounds won a gold medal and “Royal Albatross” won a bronze medal.