Ann Macbeth

We're under the Arts Council under the Minister for the Arts. The Minister for the Arts and the Minister for Industrial Development have great difficulty in agreeing over who should fund what in terms of film.

Ten years ago I was not heavily involved in the film world but on reflection it was a boom time with the mineral boom happening, so there was immense growth for industrial training films, documentaries to do with the mining, and the outback world.

In 1975 Australia was producing things like Picnic at Hanging Rock, in other words films that I would consider still some of the finest products to come out of Australia. I think that our quality now is less than it was then.

Jamaica's a country of great dichotomy. On the one hand you have a tourist industry with great beaches and resorts, but on the other you have such great poverty and the violence that goes along with that.

The market is incredibly inefficient and capable on rare occasions of being utterly dysfunctional. And people have a really hard time getting their brain around that fact. They want to believe that it's approximately efficient almost all the time, and it simply isn't true.

What I look for when I see a piece of art for the first time is some kind of emotional, intellectual experience, that's a combination of both of those things and is informed by my knowledge and something new that I see the artist doing.