Where We Come From: The Writer’s Journey AUCKLAND

Where We Come From: The Writers’ Journey — Auckland

This live panel asks what it means to tell the stories of Aotearoa from its biggest, most diverse city, a place remaking itself faster than almost anywhere else in the country, and increasingly the engine room of the screen industry that speaks for the nation. A city of many languages, cultures and communities to a single national story on screen. And as the city changes, does what reaches the screen keep pace?

This conversation brings together writers and critics to talk honestly about the history, the legacy, and the ongoing fight of being a screenwriter here, not just the stories we've told, but who has been in the room to tell them.

• Who gets to tell the stories of Aotearoa, and from where?
• As Auckland grows more diverse, does the work on screen reflect the city that makes it?
• How have funding, gatekeeping and industrial frameworks shaped whose stories reach production?
• What does it mean to carry the responsibility of national storytelling from a city of a million-plus?
• And who is still missing?

Film and television do more than entertain. They reflect and refract us: and for decades, much of what New Zealand has seen of itself has been imagined, written and assembled here.

• So how are we doing?
• Are the stories on screen the stories of the city that makes them?
• Are audiences changing faster than the industry is?
• And what does the next fifty years demand of writers in this city?

This is not a nostalgia panel. It is a stocktake. A reckoning. And a forward look.

Join us live in Auckland as we trace the writer's journey through change, contest and reinvention, in the city where so much of Aotearoa's screen story is made.

When: Saturday 22 August 2026, 2pm - 4pm

Where: Kōmanawa Theatre

Te Puna Creative Hub

8/14 Henderson Valley Road,

Henderson, Auckland

Panellists:

Diana Wichtel — Journalist and critic who was the New Zealand Listener's television critic and feature writer for 36 years, and author of the award-winning memoirs Driving to Treblinka and Unreel: A Life in Review.

Dominic Corry — Auckland-based film and television critic, entertainment journalist and broadcaster; Letterboxd Editor-at-Large, with bylines across the NZ Herald, Flicks and Entertainment Weekly, and a regular reviewer on RNZ.

Rachel Lang MNZM — Award-winning screenwriter, showrunner and executive producer who co-created Outrageous Fortune, Go Girls, The Almighty Johnsons and Nothing Trivial, and began her career as Shortland Street's first New Zealand story editor.

Victor Rodger ONZM — Award-winning playwright, screenwriter and producer of Sāmoan and Scottish descent whose work — from the stage plays Sons and Black Faggot to Shortland Street and Teine Sā: The Ancient Ones — interrogates race, identity and belonging.

Scotty Cotter — (Tainui, Fijian, Scottish) Award-winning actor turned writer-director whose credits include the series Dead Ahead and Rule of Mum and the stage work Neke, with storytelling that reshapes conventions around Indigenous narrative.

Moderated by:

Alice Shearman, Executive Director, NZWG

Thanks to our sponsors:

Te Puna Creative Hub, Authorship Collecting Society Australia Aotearoa and Australian Writers Guild.

Part of the NZWG 50th Anniversary programme — a year-long celebration of the writers behind Aotearoa’s screen stories.

Because no screen story begins without a writer. And no industry survives without understanding where it has come from.