Reflections on Work and Health
What is going on in the world? Africa, the birth place of humanity, is wracked with sickness. The Middle East, the cradle of civilization, is in uncivilized chaos. Oh dear, oh dear.
I wonder what others in this industry have been up to. I know what I’ve been up to and most of that has had very little to do with filmmaking. As I’ve no doubt said before, once upon a time I’d be chomping at the bit for work if a couple of months went by with no offers of work, nowadays, if a month or two goes by with no offers of work I find myself quietly hoping that another month or two will go by. All very well for someone receiving superannuation payments, though I haven’t quite yet learned to work within the ‘super’ budget. Hopefully some paying work will come along. Meantime, heaps of stuff to get on with around home. Still a couple of fences to pull back into shape. Always a bit of concrete to be laid, paths to patch. Prepping the garden for spring. Inside jobs to do during the worst of the winter weather like re-arranging the office furniture, which is what I was doing when I ruptured my Achilles tendon. No heavy lifting involved in the accident, just me and my battery-powered vacuum cleaner. I tripped over it and found myself lying flat on the floor. No pain, thank goodness, just a bit of a twang and a sense of queasiness when I realised what I had done. Now, more than eight weeks later and after six weeks in a cast to keep my toes pointing downwards, I’m getting around in a thing called a moon boot. The heel tendon is slowly healing. This is going to take a while.
I should say that my dealings with ACC have been very straightforward. Some years ago I decided that as a freelancer I was better off to move from ACC Cover Plus to ACC Cover Plus Extra. Goodness knows who makes up the silly titles, but the difference is that regular ACC Cover Plus pays 80% of your previous year’s average weekly earnings. I encountered this some years back when I had a car crash one morning en route to work on The Frighteners. The year before I had earned not much at all and my ACC payments were next to nothing. With ACC Cover Plus Extra I choose how much weekly cover I want to receive if I have an accident and pay accordingly, a bit more like regular income protection insurance I suppose. I would suggest that this is a better option for us freelancers who can’t predict what our earnings will be from one year to the next. I’m not sure how ACC will decide when I’m fit to go back to work, or if there will be any work to go back to.
Strangely, with all this down time, two projects which I worked on played at the recent film festivals. Paul Wolffram’s doco, with Richard Nunns and Horomona Horo, Voices of the Land – Nga Reo o te Whenua and Sarah Corderey’s doco about the Palestine-Israel situation, Notes to Eternity. I’ve not yet seen either film completed, but Sarah’s film seems scarily relevant at this time.
In the July issues of North and South magazine and in the National Business Review there were articles about the film industry’s relationship with Film NZ. Interesting reading which tended to confirm my opinion that Film NZ has become little more than another PR branch of central government. Time for change in my opinion, but then there is much in this world which I would like to see changed. Oh dear, oh dear.
Albol
