Anti-oppressive approachs to film making, creative practice and research
Narrative practice, which shares roots with decolonial ethics and ideas, can support intentional acts to deconstruct, reclaim and reimagine creative practice(s) outside of embedded imperial, colonial, patriarchal and capitalist structures. As a body of practices it offers a nuanced and complex place to meet the questions we grapple with about ethical movement in engaging with lived experience.
Questions are my craft and my passion - I deeply enjoy the practice of shaping questions that are response based, deconstructive, invitational, political and relational with the intention to accompany people in the many endeavours to articulate and share experience. I witness the profound effects daily of what happens when someone has articulated an experience in ways that they haven’t before and the momentum that emerges from this and is expressed through the medium(s) they choose. Read more about Poh's approach |
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Current Projects
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The wolves always come at night
Gabrielle Brady
A feature hybrid film alongside a Mongolian nomadic family tracing their displacement from their homeland to the ger districts of the city. Premiere at TIFF 9th September 2024 Renèe Helèna Browne
Sanctus! is a new film installation exploring devotion in relation to portraiture, faith, and belonging. Engaging with lived experience: narrative therapy and film making (working title)
Poh Lin Lee
Book in process: Drawing on insights from practice-led research at the intersection of narrative therapy and film making processes, this book will offer a place to meet, rest and grapple for anyone participating in the producing and sharing of stories about lived experience, be it filmmakers, novelists or researchers. Written in braided, creative non-fiction form, this book is designed to accompany practitioners, students and scholars as well as interested readers in their varied locations and practices. Stranger Waves
Rae Choi
A bereft woman struggling to reckon with her grief is haunted by phantom sounds and visitations by an unknown spirit. |
Walk by Me
Filmmaker Lisa Leeman and animation artist Gabi P. reconnect twenty-five years after Leeman profiled the evangelical transgender artist’s transition in the 1990 documentary Metamorphosis (Sundance Filmmakers’ Trophy/ POV). Now middle-aged, the two artists rekindle a lapsed friendship as they reckon with the past and face uncertain futures. Filmed over five years as Gabi navigates a series of crossroads in her sixties, Walk by Me weaves past and present to explore aging, art and resiliency, faith, filmmaking, friendship, and the blurred boundaries in documentary filmmaking.
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Melaleuca
Jess Barclay Lawton
"Remy makes a decision to finally get out of Cairns, but when their notoriously elusive mother reappears, they are forced to re-evaluate their choices, relationships and identity." |
Decolonizing Bodies
"We meet you in this piece during an exchange between our two bodies of practice - process-driven film & community-making and anti-oppressive narrative therapy practice".
Xiaolu and Poh are collaborating to bring together this multi-media, braided piece called Fragments contain worlds: encounters between bodies (working title) that is included in a collection of essays under contract with Bloomsbury Press. Editors: Carolyn Ureña (University of Pennsylvania) and Saiba Varma (UC San Diego) |
our multi-storied bodies
Poh Lin Lee
This book is a creative non-fiction weaving of fragments of co-produced knowledges, themes, questions, exercises that invite us to come towards bodies from different ideas, paradigms and practices. Each chapter will move between different forms to create an experiential possibility for the reader - creative written fragments to illustrate key ideas; transcript or video fragments from co-research conversations, contributions from collaborators (written sections, reflections); exercises/questions for the reader to participate with. Shifting between different multimedia forms - video fragments, transcripts, written creative non-fiction fragments, images, exercises intentionally disrupts the dominance of singular knowledge transmission and meaning making processes. |
The Socio-cultural impacts of state border closures in Australia (working title)
A collaboration with Tarryn Narain (medical anthropologist, writer and senior lecturer at La Trobe University) exploring people's experiences through sandplay co-research.
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The Mothership
Naomi Okabe
An ongoing research-creation project and speculative work that puts academic, science fiction, and documentary methods in conversation around themes of motherhood, space exploration, and futurity. |
Gabrielle Brady
Set amongst the lush hyper colour tropics of north Queensland Australia, Nina is an ecologist who runs a successful environmental consultancy firm. Her ordered life is interrupted when she unexplainably starts wandering in her sleep at night to the nearby rainforest. THE FLIGHTLESS BIRD is a metaphysical ghost story that explores the uncanny sensation of guilt, denial and complicity. |
Wet Togetherness
Xiaolu Wang
The spirit of a drowned child leads Xiaolu on a pilgrimage to dismantle the fear of water. By visiting with humans and marine mammals who are exploring interdependence and collective organizing, new paradigms of engaging with the water and each other, emerge. |
Ten Seconds of Sugar
Martine Granby
a personal essay documentary film about intergenerational care and the systemic barriers Black women face while seeking mental health resources- told through the lens of my mother, my maternal grandmother, and myself. Utilizing decades of my family photos, videos, present-day footage, and pop culture media around perceptions of mental health, Ten Seconds presents a look into understanding what it means to overcome structural inequalities to seeking care and what we pass down |
The Queen of the Southern Seas (Working Title)
Florian Kunert
In response to the ongoing threat of the volcano Merapi to the people of Yogyakarta, Indonesia, "The Queen of the Southern Seas" (WT) explores the intertwining of traditional nature spirituality, scientific observation and tourist activities. |
Storying Experience Cards
A set of cards and audio exercises to engage imagination, embodied experience and storytelling. For people engaged in creative or therapeutic endeavours that wish to step closer to articulating and sharing lived experience through story. To read more or access the audio exercises click here.
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Completed Projects
Synchronized Swimming
Nadine Schwitter
Grandma, mother and granddaughter are stranded in the parking lot of a Thermal Hotel. Due to water damage, they ar unexpectedly stuck in the car until the breakdown service frees them from the terrible confinement. The film sheds light on the intra-family patterns between grandma, granddaughter and mother, their mutual expectations, dependencies, power games and the responsibility they bear for each other in very different ways. "My work as a director is process-oriented. While writing the script, I work closely with the actors. Before filming, I use improvisations and rehearsals to develop and deepen the characters and their relationships." |
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The Treasury of Human Inheritance
Alexis Kyle Mitchell
The Treasury of Human Inheritance is a poetic film about the experience of living with and alongside genetic disease and disability. Tracing loops, echoes and repetitions across the physical and spiritual realms, ‘The Treasury’ combines documentation of family home movie footage; somatic and religious rituals for death and life after death; abandoned urban architectures teeming with natural growth; celluloid film hand-processed in genetic material; and an analogue synthesizer soundtrack that mimics inheritance patterns of genetic disease. In essence, this is a film about a family – but, more than that, it is a film made from the everyday patterns we embody in order to live through and with one another. Memory is so linked with Reputation
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Phantasy, Psychoanalysis and Ph(f)ictions
Phantasy, Psychoanalysis and Ph(f)ictions invites 4 artists, Allie J Carr, Jade Montserrat, Samantha Sweeting and Michelle Williams Gamaker to work using the Lacanian model of the Cartel: a small, focused working group which invites expert mentors to join them in co-researching. Supported by the Arts Council England's Develop Your Creative Practice bursary, this year-long research group will meet four times to forge an artistic alliance with individuals working creatively within the fields of Phantasy, Psychoanalysis and Ph (f)iction. The aim is to produce an artistic publication and to build a network between artists and individuals working with psychoanalysts.
Freedom SwimmerThis is the story of a grandfather’s perilous swim from China to Hong Kong that parallels his granddaughter’s own quest for a new freedom.
Winner of the academy accredited Yoram Gross award at the Sydney Film festival and screened and many festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Slamdance, Stuttgart Animation Festival and Aspen Shortsfest. |
"The absence of the witch does not invalidate the spell"
"...By positioning photos taken through my laptop, alongside existing portraits taken in person; this collection
attempts to visually depict the difference in contact we are experiencing as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic...the title, taken from Emily Dickenson’s poem “1383” about friendship and endurance, encapsulates my thoughts on how we still care for and love one another, even though we cannot be physically present in each other’s lives..." |
Belongings: A photographic exploration of Surti family heirlooms
"...a collection of stories told through family heirlooms in Surat, India...the participants spoke about keeping their heirlooms to evoke memory, preserve a story, or represent a precious moment in time...each object, significant in its own right, reveals the participants’ connection to their ancestors, and suggests a subtle connection between the present and the past..."
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Solange sie noch arme haben
As long as you still have arms "The 1980s of the GDR - the group around the puppeteer Frank is arrested for distributing pacifist pamphlets...Different truths and memories stand side by side. The focus is on a person who tries to never act out of a position of victim and shows his personal approach to the dictatorship of the GDR." Hofer-filmtage trailer |
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Fortschritt im Tal der Ahnungslosen
Progress in the Valley of the People Who Don't Know "One of the most original, funny and at the same time melancholic films of the Berlinale 2019" Andrea D’Addio - Goethe Institut |
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Foreign Body
“A truthful tender story of reclaiming the body after abuse. A beautiful and brave piece.... strikingly simple…. one of the most truthful explorations of the subject…. restrained direction... a stunning soundtrack… this show will only continue to grow and charge people with the courage to speak out.” Hiive |
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Island of the Hungry Ghosts
“The best documentary award goes to a film that demonstrates extraordinary mastery of the full symphonic range of cinematic tools: cinematography, editing, score, sound design and, perhaps greatest of all, an exquisite use of metaphor. To a film that moved us deeply, impressed us immensely and made us feel we were witnessing nothing less than the emergence, fully formed, of a major new cinematic talent." Tribeca Jury, 2018 |