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Issue date: 
Friday, 4 December 2020

Head Count 2019/20

The following data has been collated to show the ethnic diversity across the pool of creatives granted NZFC development and/or production funding during the 2019/20 financial year.  

Demographic data about key creatives including ethnicity is captured as part of the application process. Applicants are given the opportunity to select all ethnicities that they identify with from a list of 180 ethnicities as outlined in the Stats NZ Classification standards for Ethnicity. Capturing data on ethnicity is important as it allows the NZFC to measure and report on the continued efforts toward establishing equality within New Zealand’s screen industry.  

The 'total response output method' has been used when interpreting this data. This method counts every ethnic group that a person identifies with. People with responses which fall into more than one group are counted once in each group. For more detail about this methodology, please refer to the About this Data section of the Data Room.

For development and production initiatives that are reported below, key creatives roles are limited to director, producer and/or writer. All references to key creative roles are in relation to these three roles. 

The graph above shows the distribution of creatives attached to projects that were approved funding and compares development and production side by side. What we would expect to see is that each ethnic group is equally represented across both initiative types and no one ethnicity is disproportionately represented in any one initiative type.  

What we do see is a consistent representation across development and production for European, Māori, and MELAA creatives. What becomes evident though is that there is an under-representation of Pacific Peoples receiving development funding. Pacific Peoples make up 6.9% of creatives attached to development funding compared to 17.3% of creatives attached to production funding. More consideration also needs to be given to Asian creatives who are under-represented in both development and production initiatives. 15% of the general population in New Zealand identify as Asian (NZ Census 2018) whereas only 7% of creatives attached to development and production funding applications identify as Asian. The NZFC is committed to ensuring that its funding is accessible to all filmmakers, so this highlights an area of attention as we need to ensure that the voices of Asian filmmakers are also heard. 

Ethnic Diversity Across Key Creative Roles

Projects Approved Development or Production Funding - View by Key Creative Role  

The following visual compares the representation of each ethnic group across the key creative roles (director, producer and writer) for those projects that received development or production financing offers in the 2019/20 period. 

The 'total response output method' is used when interpreting this data. This method' counts every ethnic group that a person identifies with. People with responses which fall into more than one group are counted once in each group. This means that the total percentage for each creative role can be greater than 100%. 

For the purpose of the following visual, minority groups have been aggregated together for comparison. The ethnic groups that make up the minority group are: Asian, Pacific Peoples & MELAA. 

Projects Approved Development or Production Funding - View by Ethnicity
 

The following graph analyses each ethnic group in isolation so that we can analyse whether or not an ethnic group is equally represented across the three key creative roles. 

This 'total response output method' is also used when interpreting this data. This method counts every ethnic group that a person identifies with and people with responses which fall into more than one group are counted once in each group. Equally, people can be attached to multiple key creatives so they are counted across each role that they are attached to.  

E.g., of the 174 Māori creatives attached to projects receiving production or development funding, 31.6% are directors, 37.9% are producers and 30.5% are writers. 

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Last updated: 
Friday, 4 December 2020