Anna Cottrell
Anna Cottrell has worked in the television industry for over 25 years as a news reporter, director and producer. She has directed documentaries for Wellington production companies, Top Shelf, Ninox and the Gibson Group as well as her own company A C Productions.
Some of her own produced and directed documentaries include, Children of Gallipoli, a documentary for TV One and Turkish Television, featuring two young New Zealanders and two Turkish students, all of whose ancestors fought at Gallipoli. The documentary screens regularly at Anzac Cove before the Dawn Service. The Whistle Blowers is a documentary about the people we love to hate: referees and umpires, the control freaks of sport. An Abbreviated Life, a finalist at the DOCNZ festival, screened on TV One in 2008. It is the story of a courageous young woman born with Cystic Fibrosis determined to outlive doctors’ expectations.
Anna’s awards include the Robert Bell travelling scholarship for television journalism. Her story on China’s One Child Family Policy won a Qantas Media Award and The Baby Chase, about infertility was a finalist at the Banff Documentary Festival. She directed programmes for the Top Shelf series for TV One, NZ An Immigrant Nation, which was a finalist in the Qantas Media Awards. Other awards include grants for an interview series on men who were in the Solomon Islands during World War 2 and an Aid Video on the Solomon Islands Development Trust.
Currently she has a Culture and Heritage award for an Oral/Video history project on refugee families and is making a documentary on a young Ethiopian student who arrived here aged 12 with no English. Later he became a prefect at his high school, representing New Zealand in athletics. He has now been awarded a scholarship to an American University: his dream, to represent New Zealand at the Olympics.
With a documentary-making colleague, Anna is curating an exhibition at Pataka, Museum of Arts and Cultures. The Migrating Kitchen Exhibition is an installation with videos featuring refugee and migrant stories. Some of the films are shot and edited by Film School graduates.
Anna has been a board member of Women In Film and Television (WIFT), the Screen Directors Guild (SDGNZ) and is a member of SPADA. With her interest in education she was on the board of Wellington College and currently chairs the Management Committee for a school for students at risk. She takes sessions on Documentary at the NZ Film and Television School, and enjoys her mentoring role. Currently Anna is working part time as a member of NZ On Air’s television team.
