CELIA

Project status: film completed July 2018; now touring cinemas and special community screenings.

Celia Lashlie, an impassioned, charismatic advocate for equality of opportunity in New Zealand, is mourned and celebrated in this documentary feature film produced and directed by award-winning journalist Amanda Millar.

Millar's documentary premiered at the NZ international Film Festival in August 2018 to standing ovations, full houses and extra screenings. As Amanda put it, "People have been missing her voice."

CELIA was produced by Am&Co ( www.amandamillar.co.nz ) and funded by philanthropist Garry Roberts with Major Arc as administrator of those funds and providing support and feedback. Trustees Lala Rolls and Viv Winter also took on the roles of editor and production accountant.

After receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis in late 2014, Lashlie asked her friend, Amanda Millar to make a film. Lashlie recognised that this film would be her last chance to share her vital messages about how to change the lives of those who live under the burden of New Zealand’s appalling violence, prison and suicide statistics.

The film presents the transformational effect of this one charismatic woman in the lives of some of the most vulnerable people in the country. It is an intimate portrait in which family, close friends, people she worked with and those she helped provide fond recollections while archival footage and hard-hitting statistics add context. It surrounds and cushions the bluntness of its shocking facts with a lyrical beauty in gently-paced images of nature, birds and monarch butterflies.

CELIA is, as Bill Gosden director of the NZ International Film Festival puts it, "Intensely moving, compassionate, funny, combative and blunt."

This work will go on to support projects related to the Celia Lashlie legacy. And like Celia herself was, the film will be a powerful advocate for social chance. @CeliaMovie