Anna Cottrell

Anna Cottrell is a documentary director and producer with a background in journalism. An advocate for the importance of telling New Zealand stories, her subjects have ranged widely, from immigration and war to child-rearing and sports umpires. Cottrell is especially interested in what motivates people, an interest that has drawn her to immigrant stories.

In 1997 she co-produced and directed three episodes in the award-winning New Zealand: An Immigrant Nation, a finalist in the Media Peace Awards that year. The series features seven families, and explores issues such as prejudice, loss, longing, identity, and preservation of culture.

In 2007 Cottrell co-curated (with Jennifer Bush-Daumec) the first of an ongoing series of gallery exhibitions under the mantle The Migrating Kitchen (stories of refugees and migrants). The Migrating Kitchen Trust aims to help the various peoples of New Zealand to showcase their stories and culture through exhibitions and public events. 

A number of Cottrell's documentaries look at attitudes towards fertility and child-rearing. Award-winner The Baby Chase explores couples struggling with infertility, while Other People's Children is about a ‘blended' family. Meanwhile her documentary Out of the Shadows includes interviews with many New Zealanders who grew up with high profile parents, among them Sam Hunt, Barry Crump, and Donna Awatere-Huata.

In 1999 Cottrell was awarded an Australasian Oral History grant for Pacific War Stories; a collection of stories by soldiers who served in the Pacific during World War II.

The Last of the Anzacs featured interviews with two surviving Gallipoli veterans, and the Children of Gallipoli was based around two New Zealands and two Turkish students whose ancestors fought at Gallipoli. Produced for TVNZ and Turkish television, the documentary is often screened at Anzac Cove before each year's dawn service. Cottrell was also the New Zealand producer on Turk Tolga Omek's feature doco Gallipoli.

Onfilm reviewer Helen Martin praised Cottrell's 2010 doco Lest We Forget as "a quiet but powerful exposition of stories told by Kiwis with strong Holocaust connections". The film was made to accompany an Anne Frank exhibition which is set to tour New Zealand until mid 2012.

In 1999 Cottrell co-directed Getting to Our Place with Gaylene Preston, a fly on the wall doco backgrounding the development of the museum Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand. Later she co-directed An Abbreviated Life, this time with Jan Jeans. Screened on television in 2008, the film follows the life of a teenager living with cystic fibrosis.

Under her production company, AC Productions, Cottrell also produced The Whistle Blowers, a documentary about sports referees and umpires and what makes them tick.

She is working on Stories of New New Zealanders - an oral/video history about ten refugee families living in the Wellington region. Another project, Running for His Life, is currently in production.

Sources include
Helen Martin, 'Edge Documentary Film Festival 2011' - Review of Lest We Forget: New Zealanders Telling Their Holocaust Stories' - Onfilm, 17 February 2011
'Holocaust Survivors New Zealand Stories Feature in Documentary Competition' (Press Release). AC Productions. Scoop website. Loaded 10 March 2011. Accessed 13 September 2011