New Zealand filmmaker and writer Peter Wells was BOTD in 1950. Born in Auckland, he studied in England before returning to New Zealand to make films with his partner Stewart Main. Their early short films Foolish Things and Little Queen boldly represented gay desire at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in New Zealand. Their 1985 short Jewel’s Darl starred trans actress and future politician Georgina Beyer. Wells and Main received widespread attention for their 1986 film A Death in the Family, a drama about a gay man dying of AIDS being cared for by his gay friends, to the horror of his conservative family. Based on Well’s experience of the death of his brother from an AIDS-related illness, the film was screened on New Zealand television at the height of AIDS hysteria, contributing to a national debate about homosexual law reform. Never afraid of controversy, Wells drew criticism for heckling Are You Being Served? actor John Inman during a television awards ceremony, and his 1990 short A Taste of Kiwi wittily intercut imagery of the All Blacks rugby team with clips from gay porn films. His first feature film, the queer-infused Victorian melodrama Desperate Remedies (co-written and co-directed with Main), premiered at the Cannes Festival in 1994. After his separation from Main, Wells undertook a number of solo projects, including the screenplay for feature film When Love Comes; Ricordi!, an experimental drama about Katherine Mansfield; and the 2001 documentary Georgie Girl, chronicling Beyer’s life and career. He had a second and lustrous career as a fiction writer, publishing two acclaimed short story collections, Dangerous Desires and Duration of a Kiss, and co-edited Best Mates, an anthology of New Zealand gay writing. He also produced several volumes of memoir, and a biographical documentary, Pansy, charting his path to becoming a filmmaker. He co-founded the Auckland Writers’ Festival in 1998, and later founded a festival to promote LGBTQ writers. Wells was married to the writer Douglas Lloyd Jenkins. He died of cancer in 2019, aged 68, shortly after the release of his hospital diaries Hello Darkness.