Jayne-Ann Young, principal of Queen Margaret College Wellington.
Schools have been dealing with smartphone use by students for the better part of a decade, so are they are necessity in a modern world, or a scourge that needs to be removed? Sarah Catherall reports. On a sunny Wellington lunchtime, students at Queen Margaret College are clustered on the school lawn, laughing and chatting. They’re making eye contact, they’re engaging, and they’re the things that principal Jayne-Ann Young spoke about when she told parents the night before about the reasons why the private girls’ school banned phones during school hours. Young’s voice boomed in the auditorium when she told parents what sparked the ban: a Tik Tok video, which went viral last year, showing a man committing suicide amid what appeared to be a cutesy video of kittens playing.
Hill grew up in Taranaki, where he attended rural primary schools and later Waitara High School. He moved to the Wairarapa to work as a journalist at the
Wairarapa Times Age before resigning in November work on creative projects. He met Ellis at the Wellington regional 48hr Film Festival nearly two years ago, and they hit it off straight away. “Within a couple of months we were like, ‘Right, let’s have a go at writing a feature.’” The idea for the film came to him as he was driving from the Wairarapa to Wellington. “My mum had given me a CD with supposedly the greatest recorder player in the world on it and it grew from there,” he said.