Memory Film: A Filmmaker’s Diary

Set against the backdrop of radical feminism, Aboriginal land rights, and widespread social upheaval, ‘Memory Film: A Filmmaker’s Diary’ is a ‘road movie’ of sorts, tracing its maker’s three-decade-long inner journey towards liberation. Adopting the lenses of psychotherapy and Eastern spirituality, and incorporating footage from Thornley’s earlier works, this hyper-intimate opus contemplates sexual politics, the pleasure and pain of motherhood, and the desire for a world free of war and colonisation. With a sweeping score by Egyptian-Australian multi-instrumentalist Joseph Tawadros and inspired by silent cinema, Thornley’s ‘Farewell film poem to life’ unfolds with haunting tactility: along with the celluloid’s visible grain, there are shots of foliage, forests, fronds of hair, fingers on skin. Thornley allows the personal to intrude on the societal, challenging established narratives and foregrounding both impermanence and the inexorable passage of time. The result is a lovingly crafted cine-poem on resistance, legacy, and carving out one’s place amid constant transformation.