Posts by Lilith __
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Hard News: Hope and Wire, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
We ,here , are getting a sense of how one woman has tried to convey her feelings
They aren’t her feelings, though, that’s the problem. They’re our feelings. She's put fiction where our real stories should be. I have great respect for Preston as a filmmaker, but I think the show is misconceived.
And I recognise that everyone in NZ has feelings about what’s happened in Chch, and that many of you have been deeply supportive. That means a lot.
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Hard News: Hope and Wire, in reply to Sacha,
she succeeded
so sorry to hear that
So sorry, Sofie. Biggest hugs.
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Hebe, I'm really sorry about your situation. So many Chch people are dealing with worse stress now than during the quakes, and with no energy or emotional stability left.
It's (relatively) easy for those outside Chch to empathise with our fear and distress from a natural disaster. So much harder to explain the exhaustion and despair after years of battling, and the impossibility of "moving on" with no money and a damaged house. -
Hard News: Hope and Wire, in reply to Ken Sparks,
Although it was great to get ‘When A City Falls’ into cinemas, we did consider making a longer form version which would incorporate the recovery and rebuilding of the city. I now sort of wish we had, given the ongoing struggle faced by many whose previous way of life has been destroyed. Maybe that would have been more meaningful than a drama series, not just for Cantabrians but for the whole country.
More on-the-ground documentary would be a huge help to Chch peeps. Big ups to Campbell Live for what they've done, but would also be good to see a longer view of the continuing struggles of Cantabrians. As it turned out , the natural disaster was just the beginning.
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I think (as I tweeted last night) there are inherent problems in dramatising a disaster. Drama is usually about the characters, and the consequences of their actions and choices. In this case, the characters are acted upon by nature. Whatever struggles they might have with each other will seem petty and melodramatic because of the context. The disaster overshadows everything.
I don’t mind if a drama doesn’t show my experience, particularly. But the experience of living through the earthquakes was a shared experience. Although our circumstances were various, all Chch people suddenly had so much in common. To other Chch people, we never needed to explain. That community was important because the horror and the strangeness were beyond words.
When we did talk to each other, we talked about the necessities: damage to our houses, closed roads and businesses, food, water, toilets. I remember going to a party where the conversation was all about toilets: how deep is your long drop, how are you covering it, chemical toilet vs portaloo, should one walk several blocks to a portaloo or is it OK to pee in the garden. For hours, we had this conversation.
I think Hope and Wire is compassionate and the makers clearly took a close interest in the situation of Chch people. But it feels like what it is, a script written by people who weren’t there.
One big thing that was missing for me was the sense of the aftershocks just rolling on and on, every few minutes, many times an hour, in the early days and weeks. If you weren’t there, this must be hard to imagine. The peculiar mental state we were in: every activity, every thought, constantly interrupted. The mixture of weariness and dread.The Merivale lady has a line about the upward force being 2-G, and how it made everything weigh twice as much. Anyone who was there would remember that the opposite was true: we were lifted, as if we weighed half as much, and then dropped back down. That upward movement is something I’ll never forget.
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Speaker: How is Government evaluating…, in reply to steve black,
Unless all evaluation of massive programme changes was simply thrown out the window to save money. Why bother when neoliberal economic theory proves you are right?
Could this be the case? That there's actually no evaluation of effectiveness?
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It’s an easy strategy for reducing welfare numbers and the ‘fiscal liability’. And, yes, it will identify some who could be working. But it also risks shaking off some of the most vulnerable, those without the strength and determination to cling on to the tree however much they may need it.
This, so much.
Great post, thank you.
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Speaker: The problem of “horror tenants”…, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
We don’t need tenancy law to tell us “neither landlord nor tenant may hit, bind, gag, or shoot each other”, do we?
Well, you might not think so, but…
Assault, kidnapping, threatening to kill, etc. are already crimes, though. I wouldn’t have thought anyone needed the Tenancy Tribunal to deal with those – it’s a Police matter.
Likewise, running a drug lab is a serious crime.
The difference with a landlord providing an unsafe house is that it’s an indirect harm, or risk of harm, to the tenant. We need tenancy law to protect tenants against this.
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Speaker: The problem of “horror tenants”…, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
Actual cases of death, not that I can find in a quick google. There’s another case of landlord violence against a tenant (http://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/local-news/6836602/Landlord-threatened-to-kill-tenant-claims), and a few couple of cases of tenants attacking landlords (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10566650 and http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=3049176, but fortunately neither of them died.
These are violent attacks, rather than injury arising from provision of an unsafe rental house.
We don't need tenancy law to tell us "neither landlord nor tenant may hit, bind, gag, or shoot each other", do we?
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Speaker: The problem of “horror tenants”…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Tenants who tear up the property in which they’re living aren’t just being negligent
And neither are the landlords who pocket bond money, withhold repairs, etc. etc. But in none of these situations does someone ACTUALLY DIE.