Author Archives: Jeni Thornley

About Jeni Thornley

Writer Director Producer - Jeni Thornley was born in Launceston, Tasmania, educated in Melbourne and lives and works in Sydney. She is a documentary filmmaker, writer and film valuer. Her award-winning documentaries 'Maidens', the collaborative feature 'For Love or Money', 'To the Other Shore' and 'Island Home Country' are landmark films in Australian independent and feminist cinema, widely distributed and screened on national television (ABC TV and SBS). Jeni was active in distribution and exhibition at Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative, worked on many independent films, wrote for Filmnews, was Manager of the Women’s Film Fund and Project Coordinator, 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, the ‘talkies’, and the TV era. 'memory film' is a tribute to the silent era and her pioneering ‘film-fathers’. She is currently a Visiting Scholar in the School of Communication, UTS, writes about film regularly and is distributing 'memory film' with Antidote Films.

Writing on documentary

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 Book chapters

‘“We are not dead”: Decolonizing the Frame – First Australians, The Tall Man, Coniston, First Contact (ed.) E. Blackmore et al., The  Routledge Handbook of Indigenous Film. Routledge, 2024.

 ‘The enigma of film: memory film: a filmmaker’s diary‘, Constructions of The Real: Intersections of Practice and Theory in Documentary-Based Filmmaking, (eds.) K. Munro et al., Intellect Books Series: Artwork Scholarship: International Perspectives in Education, 2023.

 ‘Island Home Country: On the possibility of praxis between “artefact” and “exegesis” in the creative arts doctorate : a case study’, eds., L. Ravelli et al, Doctoral Writing in the Creative and Performing Arts: the researcher/practitioner nexus (Libri, UK 2014).

Island Home Country, ‘Working with Aboriginal protocols in a documentary film about colonisation and growing up white in Tasmania’, in Eds. Peters-Little, Curthoys & Docker,  ’Passionate Histories Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australia’, (Aboriginal History Monograph 21 ANU Press, 2010.

PHD ‘Island Home Country’– Subversive mourning: working with Aboriginal protocols in a documentary film about colonisation and growing up white in Tasmania. A cine-essay and exegesis (online), UTS 2010. https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/handle/10453/36070

Essays and Reviews

 Published alongside ‘Contested Histories: The Documentaries of Jeni Thornley’ Retrospective, Melbourne Cinematheque, ACMI, October 2024 are the CTEQ Annotations on Film, Senses of Cinema, October 2024:  Memory Film (2023) by Janice Loreck;  Island Home Country (2008) by Sian Mitchell; Maidens (1978) and  Film For Discussion (1973) notes by Jeni Thornley (dir: Martha Ansara and Sydney Women’s Film Group; Thornley performs the main character).

‘Looking at Women’, Peephole Journal , Issue 7, 2017. Writing on making the short film Still Life (Thornley& Ross, 1974 ), I investigate our “original intention of challenging the male gaze”. 

 ‘Islands of possibility: Film-making, cultural practice, political action and the decolonization of Tasmanian history’, Studies in Australasian Cinema, Decolonizing Screens, 7.2:  2013.

  ‘The eye of the camera: Ethnographic documentary and the Aperture Festival’, Metro Media & Education Magazine, Issue 181, Sept.2014.

“The ethnography of compassion: documentary in Vietnam”, Realtime #13 2013.

 Review of “Cinema’s Alchemist: The Films of Péter Forgács”, in Screening The Past, 2012.

Go back to where you came from: Reality TV encounters the refugee crisis, The Conversation, June 2011.

  ‘Australia Documentary: History Practices and Genres’, Trish FitzSimons et al, Cambridge UP, 2011, Metro Magazine, No 173, 2011.

Also see various essays on my blog: Documentary, including,  Intertextuality in Margot Nash’s ‘The Silences’; Journey Among Women #metoo 

L-R Nell Campbell, Robyn Moase, Tom Cowan, Rose Lilley, Peter Gailey, Jeni Thornley, Journey Among Women, 1976.