Briar March


Briar March is a New Zealand freelance film director, cinematographer, editor and educator who is mainly known for her documentaries. Her work has included films on climate change, anti-nuclear protestors in the UK, and on the New Zealand Olympic gold medal-winning athlete, Valerie Adams.

Career

March released her first feature documentary, Allie Eagle and Me, about the feminist artist Allie Eagle, in 2004. With this film she became the youngest filmmaker to have had a feature premiere at the New Zealand International Film Festival. In that year, she obtained a Bachelor in Fine Arts from the Elam School of Fine Arts of the University of Auckland. Her documentary on climate change, There Once Was an Island, was shown at over 50 festivals and won several awards. She then studied for a Master of Fine Arts at Stanford University in California, as a Fulbright scholar. In 2009 she directed the television series Kete Aronui. In the academic year 2011-12 she was responsible for designing and teaching courses on cinematography, documentary production, video production, and documentary history at the Florida Atlantic University. On returning to New Zealand she made a social housing documentary called A Place to Call Home.
March has worked as a television editor, production manager, and cinematographer on both fiction and documentary films. In 2013 she worked for Attitude Pictures Ltd making television documentaries about people living with disabilities. Since then she has been a freelance director, initially making a feature documentary for Maori Television. In 2017 she made a film called The Coffin Club about people in New Zealand preparing their own coffins. Having previously worked as an editor on films that looked at New Zealand's Nuclear Free protests, she directed Mothers of the Revolution, a documentary on the women at the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp in England, released in 2021. She then made a film about champion shot-putter Valerie Adams, which was released in 2022.

Films

Films that March has directed are:

Awards

March has received over 30 international awards and nominations, including: