Juliette Veber

Born in England, Juliette Veber moved to Auckland with her parents when she was five. After graduating with a Bachelor of Communications Studies from Auckland University of Technology, majoring in television, she entered the screen industry in 1995. 

One of her first jobs was as production coordinator on director Harry Sinclair's TV series and movie Topless Women Talk About Their Lives. She went on to work closely with Sinclair and producer Fiona Copland on two further features — as associate producer on The Price of Milk (2000), and as lead producer on Toy Love (2002).

Veber made her first steps into directing in 1998, when she co-directed documentary A Kiwi Christmas with David Ambler. It follows four Kiwi families in the lead-up to Christmas.

Whilst in New York, developing a documentary about Chinese garment workers, Veber was asked by one of the workers about social conditions in New Zealand. The question made her realise she should actually be telling "a story about my own country".

She returned to Auckland "with one thing in mind" — to make a social issue cinéma vérité" (observational) documentary about the land she grew up in. She decided it would involve South Auckland, partly to challenge attitudes to how the area was often portrayed in the media, partly because she "hadn't seen an in-depth documentary set there before".

Veber worked in various jobs in South Auckland, including six months as an Arts Coordinator at Aorere College. She stumbled upon her topic while interviewing three women who had each been helped by an organisation for the homeless. Learning that each woman felt decisions made whey they were 13 and 14 had "shaped their lives", Veber decided to make a film about "this crucial moment in a teenager's life".

Trouble Is My Business revolves around impassioned Aorere College assistant principal (and truancy officer) Gary Peach. After being accepted for the 2007 New Zealand Film Festival, Veber decided to withdraw the film and rework it, after Peach expressed concerns at being painted too much as a hero. The extended editing process began over; thankfully for Veber the result was "a much better film". 

Upbeat reviews followed the first packed screenings at the 2008 fest. The NZ Herald called it a "very moving report from education's frontline ... a compelling watch". The Sunday Star-Times found it "tough, touching and tender". Dominion Post critic Graeme Tuckett praised Veber's "unadorned and simply wrought direction" for allowing "the subjects to tell their own stories with no overt intrusions from the filmmaker".

In 2006, Veber moved to Wellington, and began a six-year stint at the NZ Film Commission as Short Film Sales and Marketing Manager.

After time as programmer and researcher for Kiwi documentary festival Doc Edge, Veber started an ambitious project chronicling the stories of teenage mothers. Over five years she filmed, photographed and wrote up the interviews that were collected on website Conversations with Teen Mums.

Veber began the project while pregnant with her second child. As she told Radio New Zealand, "I definitely thought, 'okay I want to make a project about motherhood; it's what I'm going through, it's what I feel connected to.' " But she was also inspired by the experiences of the three mothers who'd helped inspire Trouble is My Business; they had found it hard to find the confidence to enter the workforce, after dropping out of school. The first of 16 interviews went online in 2017.

After short stints teaching documentary-making, and managing shorts for writing organisation Script to Screen, Veber joined the Loading Docs project in early 2019. Each year emerging filmmakers make short documentaries across a wide range of topics; Veber joined Julia Parnell, and over the next four years shepherded roughly 30 Loading Docs to completion.  

Profile updated on 17 March 2023

Sources include
Juliette Veber, 'Making Trouble without causing it' - OnFilm, May 2009, page 22 (Volume 26, number 5)
'Juliette Veber' LinkedIn website. Accessed 17 March 2023
Conversations with Teen Mums website. Accessed 17 March 2023
'Juliette Veber - Conversations with Teen Mums' (Interview) Radio New Zealand website. Loaded 26 August 2017. Accessed 17 March 2023
Tom Hunt, 'Small films that make a big impact' (Interview) - The Dominion Post, 15 November 2010 
Graeme Tuckett, 'Trouble Is My Business' (Review) - The Dominion Post, 13 August 2009