Jennifer Thornley: Island Home Country - a personal documentary on history and race
BA Monash
Grad Cert. Teaching, WBTC
Grad Dip Lib. UNSW
MFA, COFA, UNSW
DCA Candidate
Sessional lecturer 57061 Issues in Documentary (MAP, H&SS)
email: Jeni.Thornley@uts.edu.au
blog: Documentary - Practice, Filmmaking, Reflections
website: Jeni Thornley
Principal Supervisor
Snr Lecturer Sarah Gibson
Co Supervisor (alt)
Professor Heather Goodall
Snr Lecturer Katrina Schlunke
Island Home Country is an essay film about Australia's colonised history and how it impacts into the present. What is our relationship to this country's violent colonial past? What is my own responsibility to this history? While it is an actual journey, it is also a film about differing ideas of nation, home, country and remembering.
The shape of the journey is not linear; it is more like a spiral, a mosaic, moving through past and present and back again.
The film and thesis explores personal memory, public history. It moves beyond the 'history wars' to analyse troubling questions: how was it possible to grow up in 1950s Tasmania and know nothing about 'what really happened' on the frontier. How are histories repressed and how do we approach the re-telling in the light of contested colonial and post colonial versions? What happens when we bring a psychoanalytic reading into the picture?
The project is working with the SBS Indigenous Protocols and the Respecting Cultures Guidelines, 2004, Arts Tasmania Aboriginal Advisory C'tee. The film is self-financed. A percentage of Island Home Country's royalties will go to the Tasmanian Aboriginal Land & Sea Council's Aboriginal Land Management Team Traineeship Program.
Island Home Country premiers at the Brisbane International Film Festival in August 2008. The film will be distributed by The Education Shop, with a Study Guide by Australian Teacher's of Media (ATOM).
Writer, Director, Producer: Jeni Thornley
Production Supervisor: Toula Anastas
Editor: Karen Pearlman
Assistant Editor: Andrew Corsi
Composer and Sound Designer: Sharon Jakovsky
Assistant to the Director: Stephen Ginsborg
Post Production House: Video 8 Media
Graphic Design: Tim Baines
DVD Authoring: Phil Purcell plxdvd
Website: Damith Herath
Seminars
Panelist 'Film As Formative Media,' Brisbane International Film Festival Seminar Program, 3rd August 2008.
Conferences
Island Home Country: Memory, History and Waking up to White Australia, Colonialism and its Aftermath Conference, University of Tasmania, 2004
OZDOX Forum, Making Australian Histories: How documentary filmmakers working with ideas of 'nation' and story. Convenor and Chair, UTS 2005
http://www.ozdox.org/x_2005/v080905.html
Links to articles, essays, on line film clips (Australian Screen Online)
Reading propaganda: UTS News, No 8: 2006
http://www.u.uts.edu.au/index_s.lasso?-token.recid=34265&-token.terms=interactive&-token.index=story&-Nothing
Felicity Collins, The Experimental Practice of History in the Film Work of Jeni Thornley, Screening the Past, 1998:
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fir598/FCfr3a.htm
Felicity Collins, Memory in Ruins: The Woman Filmmaker in Her Father's Cinema, Screening the Past. No. 13, 2001
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr1201/fcfr13a.htm
Jeni Thornley, Through a Glass Darkly, Meditations on Cinema, Memory, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Women Vision (ed) Lisa French, Damned Publishing, Melbourne, 2003
http://esvc001106.wic016u.server-web.com/contents/books/03/27/womenvision.html
For Love or Money
Maidens
Australia Daze
The project is working with the SBS Indigenous Protocols.
Respecting Cultures Guidelines, 2004, Arts Tasmania Aboriginal Advisory C'tee.