Narrative therapy and film making / creative practice / research

Narrative practice, which shares roots with decolonial feminists 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 and creative 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.

Current Projects

Rare Birds

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.

Sweepers of the Realms

Florian Kunert
In Yogyakarta, Indonesia, life unfolds between fire and water. To the north rises Merapi, the world’s most active volcano; to the south lies Parangtritis Beach, where unpredictable currents claim lives each year. For generations, the people have sought harmony with these elemental forces, invoking the Queen of the Southern Sea in a dialogue between the seen and unseen worlds.

Walk by Me

Filmmaker Lisa Leeman and animation artist Gabi reunite twenty-five years after Leeman chronicled Gabi’s gender transition over three years in the 1990 documentary Metamorphosis (Sundance Filmmakers’ Trophy/ POV).  Walk by Me weaves past and present as Gabi pursues her artistic aspirations, secure housing, family acceptance,  and a more welcoming church.  Together they question the making of Metamorphosis and this new film.   Filmed over nine years, Walk by Me challenges assumptions that aging equals decline;  that gender is strictly binary; or that you can ever be too old to pursue your dreams.

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. 

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

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Completed Projects

The wolves always come at night

Director: Gabrielle Brady
A feature hybrid film alongside a Mongolian nomadic family tracing their displacement from their homeland to the ger districts of the city.

Australia's official selection for Best International Feature at the 2026 Academy Awards. 

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Sanctus!
Renèe Helèna Browne
Sanctus! is a new film installation exploring devotion in relation to portraiture, faith, and belonging.

Some kind of blue

Rae Choi
A bereft woman struggling to reckon with her grief is haunted by phantom sounds and visitations by an unknown spirit.

Così Com’è

Antonello Scarpelli
A worried mother, a sick father and an absent son. A film about a family trying to communicate with each other.

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."

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
Was hat das Ansehen mit dem Gedächtnis zu tun? Und wie lässt sich aus zerstückelten Erinnerungsfragmenten eine Filmdramaturgie bauen? Kann man Parallelen zwischen der Arbeit am Film und dem therapeutischen Umgang mit einem Trauma ziehen? Narrative-Therapist Poh Lin Lee im Gespräch mit Regisseurin Alison Kuhn über ihren aktuellen Film „The Case You“.
What does reputation have to do with memory? And how can a film dramaturgy be built from dismembered memory fragments? Can one draw parallels between working on the film and dealing with trauma therapeutically? Narrative therapist Poh Lin Lee talks to director Alison Kuhn about her current film The Case You.

In Good Hands

Naomi Okabe
In Good Hands is a prismatic exploration of gender roles, care, and the meaning of good work. The film features six people who have challenged gender stereotypes to find meaningful work, including a carpenter-turned-beekeeper, a stay-at-home dad, a highland cattle breeder, a flower farmer, an auto body technician, and an early childhood educator. Following them through their work day, the film expresses the balancing act between self-satisfaction through career, caretaking, and the desire to contribute to the greater good.
The film features my mother who went to school to become a carpenter when she was raising my sister and I as a single mom. That experience, along with my own struggles with identity and career after becoming a mother, is what inspired the questions I explore in the film.

Freedom Swimmer

This 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.

Get to the Wire

Paul Burns
'...in the year 2032, Judy, an environmental refugee from Australia, is being detained in a British detention centre while isolated from her family...'

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

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

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

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