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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 is a participating film artist and Assistant Producer for the upcoming THE WEIGHT OF MOUNTAINS film residency, which will take place from Dec '25 - Feb '26 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in collaboration with A Farm International Art Residency and RMIT Vietnam.
twomfilm.com
SEVEN DAWNS
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Jenna Dawkins (Australia 2024)
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2.38 min. Silent.
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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.
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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.
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Screenings ~
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17th February 2025, ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image), Melbourne ~ Artist Film Workshop Program
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27th August 2024, Visual Diary Gallery, Melbourne ~ Anniversary Show
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