Margaret Thomson

Margaret Thomson (10 June 1910 – 30 December 2005) was an Australian-born documentary filmmaker who divided her forty-year career between New Zealand and England. She was the first female film director active in New Zealand. Family and education Margaret Thomson was born in Australia to Gertrude Thomson and James Allan Thomson, a geologist. He was appointed head of the Dominion Museum in Wellington, so Margaret spent most of her childhood in New Zealand. She attended Canterbury University, graduating with a degree in zoology. Film career She moved to England in 1934. Her first film-related job in England was with Gaumont-British Instructional Films, for whom she worked initially as their film librarian and subsequently as editor for a series of films on the ecology of Great Britain. She left in 1938 and worked as a film editor elsewhere, eventually joining Realist Film Unit (RFU) in 1941. Partly due to the onset of World War II, which opened opportunities for women while men were at war, she worked on a large number of RFU film projects, many aimed at educating people about dealing with wartime conditions. She shot two postwar projects, Children Learning by Experience (1946) and Children Growing Up with Other People (1947), in a proto-cinéma vérité style in order to capture the children's behavior with as little interference as possible. She stayed at RFU for six years, developing a reputation as an outstanding director who conveyed complicated information clearly and without talking down to her audiences. In 1947, she was offered a position as a director for New Zealand's National Film Unit (NFU), and she returned to the country where she had been raised. Her NFU short film Railway Worker (1948) is now considered a classic, and the NFU's head called it the best thing the NFU had produced up to that point in its history. One of the things that set the film apart from others of its era is that it showed the workers' home lives as well as their work lives. Thomson's own favorite among her NFU films was another short, The First Two Years at School (1949), which offered a close look at a school for Māori children.