Today, I flew from Auckland to Wellington, for the second leg of the New Zealand International Film Festival. Wellington is a stunningly beautiful town, which everyone here calls the San Francisco of New Zealand. Like San Francisco, it is mostly made up of colorfully painted Victorian houses on hilly streets overlooking a bay. And like San Francisco, it seems to have a bohemian, counter-cultural atmosphere.

At the festival, I saw an inspiring and moving documentary portrait of Ans Westra, the Dutch-born New Zealand photographer whose works I had been totally unfamiliar with until today. Ans Westra, who is now in her seventies, attended the screening. She's one of those people that you just want to hug. A true artist. Seeing the film made me want to abandon fiction and devote myself exclusively to making documentaries.

In the film, Ans Westra tells the story of how she was inspired to take up photography after seeing a book of photographs by then 17-year old Johan Van Der Keuken, whose portraits of his classmates had just been published. She and he were the same age, and his example made her believe that she too could make a contribution to the art form.

Many years later, I met Johan Van Der Keuken, who by then had become one of the world's most revered documentary filmmakers. He was being honored by the San Francisco Cinematheque and I somehow ended up giving him a ride from the screening back to his hotel. I told him how much his films had meant to me when I had first encountered his work 15 years earlier. He had already been diagnosed with cancer at this point, and died a few months later.

Baudelaire compares artists to beacons in the night. Johan Van Der Keuken was a beacon to Ans Westra, who tonight was a beacon to me.