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JENNA DAWKINS
Editor, Assistant Editor & Filmmaker
Jenna is an emerging experimental film artist working with Super 8 and 16mm analogue moving image. Her hand-developed films embody a raw, tactile sensibility, exploring themes of restlessness, lost histories, the lyricism of memory, ancestral ghosts and insomnia.
She is a member of Artist Film Workshop, a Naarm (Melbourne) based artist-run film lab dedicated to small-gauge analogue filmmaking.
Jenna attended the South East Asian Big River Analogue Film Lab Meeting held in Kanchanaburi, Thailand in Dec 2025.
SEVEN DAWNS
Jenna Dawkins (Australia 2024)
2.38 min. Silent.
Seven Dawns explores the restlessness that is inherited from the artist’s estranged Romani ancestry – the Nevi Wesh (New Forest) in South West England. Seen here as a spectral ancestral haunting, nomadism has disrupted the artist’s life and lineage. However, film becomes a medium of kinesthetic communion: nomadic in its time-based essence it embodies an endless pursuit of motion.
The seven dawns symbolize fleeting opportunities for escape, framed within the duality of home as both sanctuary and incarceration. Captured each morning on a single Super 8mm film cartridge, using a handmade lens crafted from a beer can, matches, and tape, and developed by hand, the film’s tactile imperfections and fragmented imagery evoke the fractured nature of history, memory, longing and place.
Screenings ~
18th October 2026, Adelaide Film Festival, Adelaide ~ Super 8 and 16mm Experimental Shorts, Artist Film Workshop Program
28th March 2026, 64th Ann Arbour Film Festival, Michigan USA ~ Special Program Rangerfinder: A Nonet, curated by Anna Kipervaser and Ted Mott.
15th December 2025, Thai Film Archive, Nakornpathom,Thailand ~ Big River Screening
17th February 2025, ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image), Melbourne ~ Artist Film Workshop Program
August 2024, Visual Diary Gallery, Melbourne ~ Anniversary Show
SILVER AND GOLD ANIMAL
Jenna Dawkins & Joshua Beahan (Australia 2026)
1.16 min.
An Asian monitor lizard devours a bird in a river of party boats on a hot night in Thailand.
Hand-developed Super 8mm pinhole film.
COMING SOON
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