Joy, It's Nina

Director: Jane Thorburn

Year: 2023

A Magic Realist Documentary. The film weaves together real and mythical events to create connections between the history of the Crystal Palace in London and the sculpture called Psyche Abandoned. The story reveals how a moment in the life of a young woman called Psyche was captured in marble and travelled through time and space to sit in the same park overlooking South London for the last 170 years, while world wars, fires, explosions, royalty, music events, funfairs and circuses have rushed past her in endless succession. This ‘moment’ is the only constant in a story of splendour and spectacle, and like all the best stories, if only half of it is true it is still an incredible tale.

Director: Jane Thorburn

Year: 2019

The writer Deborah Levy imagines a lost lecture written by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis.  It investigates an hysterical woman dancing through time, snow leopards lapping milk in the kitchen of Freud’s last house, and a journey under the ground on a ghost train.

Director: Eamon Bourke

Year: 2026

Filmmaker Eamon Bourke lost his mother, Sue, when he was three and has no memory of her. When his father decides to sell the remote Lake District home where she died, Eamon returns with his camera to document the house and its clearing. Among Sue’s belongings - diaries, poems, photographs and tapes - he discovers a box of damaged cassette recordings. After painstakingly repairing them, he uncovers something extraordinary: his mother’s voice. Through these intimate audio diaries, Sue speaks candidly about motherhood, sings to her children, and captures fleeting family moments Eamon never knew. One final tape records her describing the onset of hepatitis, days before she fell into a coma and died in 1983. Another, more haunting still, features three-year-old Eamon calling out to his unconscious mother in hospital, in a desperate attempt to bring her back. As Eamon pieces together this archive, he confronts the enduring impact of early loss, speaking with his father and sisters while retracing the emotional landscape of his childhood. Set against the vast beauty of the Lake District, a deeply personal exploration of grief, memory and love - an attempt to recover what was lost, and to finally say goodbye.