For round 2, 2022 Jeni Thornley’s received a grant from Lesbians Incorporated for their film ‘memory film: a filmmaker’s diary’. The project is a poetic documentary based on Thornley’s Super 8 archive (1974-2003), filmed during the decades of her personal and political filmmaking while producing ‘Maidens’, ‘To the Other Shore’, ‘Island Home Country’ and collaborative feature ‘For Love or Money’.
Documenting the activism of three decades, amidst the intense sexual politics of radical feminism and social change, ‘memory film’ is a road movie of an inner journey of liberation – gender fluidity, utopian lesbian separatism, love and its tribulations, the pleasure and pain of motherhood, violence against women and the desire for a world free of war and colonising. It is an experiential, lyrical film expressing cinema’s power, not in an ‘issue’ based way, but with a poetic sensibility via images and music, as in the silent cinema. Accompanied by a unique music score, with no speaking voices, narration or interviews, the film offers an immersive experience into radical politics and the dynamic interplay between the personal and the political – transforming lives.
