Remembering, Repeating, Working-Through - A Conversation With Jeni Thornley

Jeni Thornley discusses her filmmaking practice of fifty years (1974-2023). Screening clips from Film for Discussion (1973), Maidens (1978), For Love or Money (1983), To the Other Shore (1998) Island Home Country (2008) and Memory Film: a filmmaker’s diary (2023), she tracks the evolving nature of ethics, links to community and the ebb and flow of the personal to the political and the universal.

“I have used the medium of film to process family trauma and national and world trauma. Freud’s psychoanalytic method, ‘Remembering Repeating and Working Through’ (1914) provides a way to think about memory and history, releasing many emotions buried in the body and the unconscious”.

BIOGRAPHY

Jeni Thornley is a documentary filmmaker, writer and film valuer. Her award-winning documentaries Maidens, the collaborative feature For Love or Money, To the Other Shore, Island Home Country and Memory Film are landmark films in Australian independent and feminist cinema, widely distributed and screened on ABC TV and SBS. Jeni was active in distribution and exhibition at Sydney Filmmakers Co-op, worked on many independent films, was co-national co-ordinator of Australia’s first International Women’s Film Festival in 1975, wrote for Filmnews, was Manager of the Women’s Film Fund and Project Coordinator in Documentary (AFC). Jeni lectured in documentary at UTS from 2002-2013 and completed her doctorate. She traces her passion in film to her father’s family, who exhibited films in cinemas across Australia during the silent period into the TV era. She is currently a Visiting Scholar in the School of Communication, UTS, writes about film regularly and is distributing Memory Film with Antidote Films.

Memory Film premiered at Melbourne International Film Festival and was nominated for the Australian Innovation Award (MIFF 2023); Best Sound in a Documentary AACTA nomination 2024 (Tristan Meredith); Sydney Premiere, Antenna Documentary Film Festival, 2024; Melbourne Women in Film Festival, 2024 https://jenithornley.com/

Memory Film

Writer & Director Jeni Thornley
Producers Tom Zubrycki & Jeni Thornley

Editor Lindi Harrison (ASE)

Composer Joseph Tawadros

Sound Designer Tristan Meredith

Still: To the Other Shore 1998 (photo Sandy Edwards); Jeni Thornley http://www.jenithornley.com/