WE LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES
“The decades of the ’60s and the ’70s were indeed interesting times, tumultuous and changing. And now, in the uncertain 2020s, these filmmakers are living through problematic times once again, with wars and fascistic despots again raging. The main difference for these filmmakers now though is that they are approaching the end of their lives. Thornley acknowledges this in her sublime film Memory Film, openly calling it a ‘death poem’.”
BILL MOUSOULIS 2025 Curator Unknown Pleasures
Sian Mitchell (MWFF Director) & Jeni Thornley, Melbourne Women in Film Festival ACMI March 2024
‘Maidens’ screening and Q&A in The Personal is Political: 1970s-80s Australian women and queer filmmakers in focus. The Rizzo UTS, July 2025.
2025 Memory Film Adelaide Premiere & Q&A, Curator Bill Mousoulis- Unknown Pleasures, Palace Nova East End Cinema 9 Feb. 2025.
2024 Plenary Session: Decentering Documentary and ‘Memory Film’ Official Selection Film Program, Monash University Dec. Visible Evidence Conference XXX, Monash University, 17-20 Dec.2024.
2024 ‘Contested Histories: The Documentaries of Jeni Thornley’ Retrospective Melbourne Cinematheque, ACMI Wed October 30 2024.
2024 Remembering, Repeating, Working-Through – A Conversation With Jeni Thornley and Felicity Collins, Melbourne Women in Film Festival, March, Gandel Lab 1, ACMI. 2024.
2024 Sustainable Futures in Screen Panelist, Melbourne Women in Film Festival, ACMI 23rd March, Gandel Lab 1, ACMI.
2024 Memory Film: a Filmmaker’s Diary: In Conversation with Jeni Thornley, Grace Boschetti interviews Jeni Thornley for the MWFF Critics Lab, ACMI March.
2023 Memory Film: ‘Behind the Scenes’: Sound Design with Tristan Meredith (sound designer), Jeni Thornley (director), Lindi Harrison (editor) MIFF Industry Accelerator Lab, MIFF ACMI 2023.
2023 Conversations & Connections Documentary Festival, Storytelling on the Ground, CDCR Macquarie Uni, SLNSW, Dec.
2022 Camera Interviewee, Senses of Cinema, 20 Years of The Filmmakers’ Co-operatives (dirs. John Hughes and Tom Zubrycki). 2022.
2021 For Love or Money, Australian Women Filmmakers Program, 23rd Seoul International Women’s Film Festival, 28th & 30th August, South Korea. Also see their short essay, Australian Women Filmmakers, 2021.
2021 Co- Panelist, ‘Australian Autofiction: A Filmmaker Roundtable by Chris Luscri’, Australian AutoFiction Special Dossier, Senses of Cinema, Issue 99.
2021 Camera Interviewee, Brazen Hussies (dir Catherine Dwyer): cinema release, festivals and ABC screenings. Brazen Hussies is a documentary feature about the revolutionary chapter of the Women’s Liberation Movement (1965 -1975); I am one of many activists interviewed for the film; I discuss my involvement in an Anti-Vietnam War street theatre group, the 1970s abortion rights campaign and other women’s liberation activities. My discussion of an illegal abortion I had in 1968, when abortion was a criminal act, stirred up a lot of complex emotions; perhaps necessary – indicating that it is still a disturbing site for me and many women- see my post: The river of souls: mizuko kuyō (水子供養) water child memorial .
2020 Co-Panelist, Catherine Dwyer in conversation with Margot Nash, Jeni Thornley, Megan McMurchy & Martha Ansara, Women Filmmakers, ACMI, Melbourne, Dec 18th. 2020
2020 Panelist, Brazen Hussies Screening and Q&A with Director Catherine Dwyer, writer Eva Cox, filmmaker Jeni Thornley and moderator Michelle Arrow, Professor in Modern History Macquarie University, November 4th Dendy Cinema, Newtown.
2019 Interview and Q&A with Beniamino Barrese (dir), The Disappearance of My Mother, Antenna International Documentary Film Festival & OzDox, Verona Cinema, Oct 23 2019.
2019 Introduction [text] to Journey Among Women(Tom Cowan, feature film 1977), for the Retrospective, Film Continent Australia, Film Museum Vienna, April-June 2019.
2019 Interviewee, Perspectives in Parryville, Ep. 6, Jeni Thornley, (Mark Parry) Sound Cloud, August. 2019.
2018 Introduction to The Silences (dir) Margot Nash UTS Tribute, ‘Stepping Into The Unknown’, Palace Cinema December 6th 2018.
2018 Kath Kenny writes about radical theatre and film and Jeni’s role in Film For Discussion (1973), Martha Ansara (dir) and Sydney Women’s Film Group: ‘Before #MeToo, 1970s feminists used film and theatre for women’s liberation, The Monthly, August 7 2018.
Jeni in ‘Film For Discussion’ 1973 [Martha Ansara with Sydney Women’s Film Group]
Jeni and her mum in Film For Discussion
2017 ‘Still Life’, (1974 dir: Ross & Thornley). ‘Art & Life, Then and Now Program’, Melbourne Women in Film Festival. Emily Burkhard reviews Still Life as “raw and evocative” in online mag ‘Mojo News,‘ along with a discussion of the contemporary films screened: Clare Ferra’s ‘Progressive Evolution; (2011) and ‘Love Oscillation’ (2012), and Amie Batalibasi’s ‘Lit’ (2016). My essay on Still Life, ‘Looking at Women’ was published in Peephole Journal, 7.
The artist model confronts the male gaze, Still Life, 1974
“The festival stood out for its series of informative and insightful panel discussions during the two-day inaugural showcase – on the role of women in screen culture, how this has evolved from the days of the 1975 International Women’s Film Festival.”
2017 Monash alumni launch new Australian women in film festival March 2017, School of Media, Film & Journalism News, Feb.
2017 Public screening and discussion: Island Home Country (52 min). Monday 14th March Mona Vale. Aboriginal Support Group – Manly Warringah Pittwater (ASG).
2017 ‘For Love or Money’, screening and Q&A, NFSA Restores Program, Nov 22nd 2017.
2017 Panelist: ‘Suffragette City: Sydney, Feminism & Film’. AGNSW, June
2017 Panelist, ‘Feminism and Film 1970s-1980s’, in ‘Martha Ansara Tribute’, OzDox Forum, AFTRS, Nov 8th:
2016 Interviewee, When the Camera Stopped Rolling (dir. Jane Castle). A documentary feature film about Lilias Fraser, pioneer of the Australian documentary film industry. Screen Australia and Documentary Australia Foundation (DAF), 2016.
2016 Interviewee, A Filmmakers’ Cinema: 20 Years of the Filmmakers’ Co-operatives (dir. John Hughes & Tom Zubrycki), a documentary film-archival project, 2016.
2016 Interviewee (audio), Genealogy of thought-practice: sexual difference (Dir.Alex Martinis Roe), an arts based documentary film, 2016.
2016 Member Film News Digitising Collective: National Library of Australia’s Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program. Finance raised from various sources, including Australian Directors Guild (ADG) 2016.
The original Film News Collective c1980
2015 Public screening and discussion: Island Home Country (52 min) Screening Indigeneity Series, Menzies Centre for Australian Studies & the Department of Film Studies, King’s College London, September 15th 2015.
2015 For Love or Money, (dir. McMurchy, Nash, Oliver, Thornley), 2nd International Women’s Film Festival Bangladesh, Seminar Hall, Central Public Library, Dhaka, 16th March 2015.
2015 Curator & Panelist, ‘Women’s Gaze and the Feminist Film Archive’, Future Feminist Archive, Art Gallery of NSW and Sydney College 2015.
Women’s Gaze film installation in Future Feminist Archive, Sydney College of the Arts (SCA), Uni of Sydney 2015.
This 2015 Program included historic women’s films: Film For Discussion,We Aim To Please, Maidens, My Survival as an Aboriginal,Size 10, and For Love or Money (AGNSW Forum on Vimeo).
2015 Public screening and discussion: Island Home Country (52 min, Screening Indigeneity Series, Menzies Centre for Australian Studies & the Department of Film Studies, King’s College London, September 15th 2015.
2015 Delegate, Critical Thought Versus The Capitalist Hydra, CIDECI, Universidad de la Tierra Chiapas, Mexico, May 2015.
2015 Maidens (dir. Thornley 1978), Retrospective Screening, Films from the Co-ops Part 1, Melbourne Cinémathèque, ACMI Cinemas, Federation Square, Melbourne, May 20 2015.
‘The Maidens’, my mum’s school play, Tasmania 1933
2015 Referee reader for monograph, Robots and Art: Exploring an Unlikely Symbiosis (eds.), D. Herath, C. Kroos & Stelarc, Springer 2015.
2015 Interviewee: In New Zealand, the Activist Complex Female Protagonist Whispers, (Marian Evans). Research Report on the New Zealand Film Commission’s Gender Policy, 2015
2015 Panelist, ‘Preserving your Films in the Digital Age’ Panel, Ozdox (Australian Documentary Group), AFTRS November. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fK1loUPT03Y&t=37s
2014 Panelist, ‘The archive of the self and deconstructing the national archive’, Maestros of the Archive, Panel, Ozdox (Australian Documentary Group), AFTRS, August https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vffFwTXjgdU&t=1s
2012 Island Home Country, International Anthropological Film Festival, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (Nov 12) ; VICAS, Vietnam Institute of Culture and Arts Studies) and screened in four venues across Ho Chi Minh City.
This was a very special event demonstrating what visual ethnography offers the documentary tradition – the vibrant energy of cultural exchange and shared consciousness. Here is a my review of the Festival in Realtime #13 2013: “The ethnography of compassion: documentary in Vietnam”. It has now been translated into Vietnamese and published in the VICAS Journal.
2012 Conference Paper, ‘The politics and poetics of subversion: documentary film-making and the de- colonization of Australian history,’ Film & History Association of A&NZ, Screen |History| Memory 2-5 December 2012
2012 Conference Paper, ‘Documentary, the database and the global archive of the internet: implications for teaching documentary film history’ Visible Evidence Conference, ANU, Canberra Dec 2012.
2012 Speaker, ‘Agnes Varda Tribute’, Introduction to Cleo from 5-7, The Gleaners and I, Beaches of Agnes, Art Gallery of NSW, Antenna International Documentary Film Festival.
2011 Conference Paper, ‘Island Home Country: on the possibility of praxis between ‘artefact’ and ‘writing’ in the creative arts doctorate’, Doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts: Challenges and diversities, Sydney College of the Arts, Univ of Sydney 18 November.
2010 Panelist, ‘Film as Practice Based Research’, (screening Island Home Country) with Dr. Hart Cohen (UWS), filmmaker Paulo Alberton and Dr. Karen Pearlman, OzDox – The Australian Documentary Forum, AFTRS October 14th 2010.
2008 Panelist, ‘Focus on Film as a Formative Media Seminar’, Colourise, Brisbane International Film Festival, July 2008.
2008 Conference Paper, ‘Aboriginal Protocols process and the ‘instability of whiteness’ in the making of Island Home Country a documentary film about Tasmania’s racialised history’, Re-Orienting Whiteness Conference, Australian Critical Race and White Studies Association, Melbourne, Dec, 2008.
2005 Curator and chair, ‘Making Australian Histories: How documentary filmmakers are working with ideas of ‘nation’ and story: The Colony, The Anzacs, and the Archive Project,’ OzDox Forum.
2004 Conference paper, ‘Island Home Country: Memory, History and Representation’, Colonialism and its Aftermath: An Interdisciplinary Conference, Univ. of Tasmania, Hobart, June 23-25.