Memory Film: A Filmmakers Diary – Jeni Thornley (Newport Beach, NSW, Australia)

Memory Film is an immersive, poetic documentary by Jeni Thornley based on her silent Super 8 archive (1974-2003), filmed during the decades of her personal and political filmmaking. Accompanied by a sweeping score by Egyptian-Australian oud maestro, Joseph Tawadros, Memory Film is a lovingly crafted, lucid meditation on resistance, legacy and carving out one’s place amid constant transformation. Documenting the activism of three decades, amidst the intense sexual politics of radical feminism and social change, Memory Film is also a road movie of an inner journey of liberation – gender fluidity, utopian feminism, love and its tribulations, the pleasure and pain of motherhood, violence against women and the desire for a world free of war and colonizing. Thornley’s ‘Farewell film poem to life’ unfolds with haunting tactility: along with the celluloid’s visible grain, foregrounding both impermanence and the inexorable passage of time. 2023; 81 min.