Nine to Noon continues to look at who's in the running to head up our biggest cities after local elections in October, with a focus today on the 11 candidates vying to be mayor of Christchurch. Three-term mayor Lianne Dalziel announced last July she'd be stepping down as mayor, having overseen nearly a decade's worth of the city's rebuild following the devastating earthquakes. The two major contenders for the role are Burwood city councillor Phil Mauger and former Canterbury District Health Board chief executive David Meates. Other contenders include the city's Wizard, a coffee boss, pro-gun pastor and a candidate who's stood in every election since 1971. For more, Kathryn is joined by David Williams, the South Island correspondent for Newsroom.co.nz.
The Christchurch City Council says it needs Government money to help repair its earthquake damaged heritage and character buildings.
Gaylene Preston has been making feature films and documentaries with a distinctive NZ flavour for over 30 years. Her latest venture is an epic six part drama series called Hope and Wire, which she produced and directed. Set in Christchurch in the aftermath of the devastating earthquakes, Hope and Wire is a fictionalised mix of characters - families that fly apart, others that come together - and what happens to a city that loses it's centre in an instant.
A frantic rewrite was required during the lockdown last year by novellist Janna Ruth, who'd set her novel Time to remember in Christchurch throughout 2020. The book's characters are mainly preoccupied by the 10th anniversary of the September 2010 Canterbury earthquake, but Janna knew she needed to include the pandemic once it took hold. But in fact she'd started working on the novel back in 2005, well before both traumatic events. Janna came to New Zealand from Germany to study geology, and she uses some of her memories from her university years in Time to remember. In it a group of university students bond and bicker, some of them still scarred by the earthquake a decade earlier.
