Dell King

Editor and director Dell King’s plans to be a filmmaker faced a challenge when she discovered that the Government’s National Film Unit had closed its doors to women directors. Instead King began her long screen career as a negative cutter, and later worked as editor or sound editor on a run of documentaries and features, including the classics Ngati and Vigil.

In film you are not moving the characters, you’re moving the audience, you’re taking them on a journey. Their eyes are the camera. The editor in a sense becomes the defender of the audience. Dell King, in the book Shadows on the Wall: A Study of Seven New Zealand Feature Films