Anti-oppressive approach to film making, creative, research and academic process
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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 |
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. |
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Current Projects
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Waves (working title)
Rae Choi
A bereft woman struggling to reckon with her grief is haunted by phantom sounds and visitations by an unknown spirit. |
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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. |
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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." |
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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) |
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our multi-storied bodies
Our multi-storied bodies names a series of practices that resists solely clinical, biological and scientific approaches by situating in community/group/collective ethics and ideas.
Poh is currently offering these practice ideas in group, individual and workshop consultation contexts and writing up this work for publication. First article coming out September 2023. |
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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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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. |
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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. |
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The Treasury of Human Inheritance
Alexis Kyle Mitchell
'...an experimental auto-ethnography about living inside family, tradition, genetics and disease.' |
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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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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. |
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Toward Reckoning (working title)
Imogen Butler-Cole
Toward Reckoning is a memoir about healing after sexual trauma and an exploration of the monolith of sexual harm. It asks questions such as: how is it possible to heal in a world that doesn’t feel safe? What does it take to encounter and accept ourselves, wholly and at the deepest level? And what positives, if any, can we take from our experiences? The book follows Imogen on her path from denial to recognition, through complex processes of re-learning to eventual ongoing healing, all while charting how the effects of her sexual assaults played out through relentless exhaustion, internalised shame and a deep mistrust in others. |
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Nightdrifters
Florian Kunert
Hybrid feature film in development. |
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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
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Collateral JournalThis is a collaboration on an article to feature in a new series looking at Conversations about Conversations. The article includes a mixture of embedded video fragments of therapeutic conversation and transcript of the unpacking of this conversation. Publication set for 2023.
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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. |
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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...' |
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"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..." |
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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 |