A film of poetic intensity, colliding images and lucid, personal narration. ‘Maidens’ is a compilation documentary of four generations of the filmmaker's family (from 1906-1977) using images drawn from old family photographs, slides, home movies and excerpts from a number of Australian women's films in which she herself has appeared. The selection of images traces the development of the family from the extended family, functioning as a productive unit on the land, to its atomisation into the nuclear family and, by the fourth generation into further disintegration and change into a yet to be defined form, The soundtrack makes use of family letters, excerpts from the Three Marias' ‘New Portuguese Letters’ and original music from a number of sources. 

The film developed its own organic growth, I could not force it to shape it needed to grow. This is how I like to work. It suits the compilation form too, a film form I am naturally drawn to. It’s a film patchwork… 

– Jenni Thornley

Jeni Thornley traces the herstory of her maternal family from its extended family beginnings on a Tasmanian farm through two wars and a depression to her own immediate family living in the city. It is the story of seventy years of change and upheaval, the gradual disintegration of the traditional family and the search for new forms and ways of relating as typified by Jeni’s attempts to break with the pattern of the past and to create a new identity for herself… The images are woven together by her intensely powerful and poetically evocative narration.

– Margaret Flaws

Description source: Circles Catalogue (circa 1983). Compiled by Helen MacKintosh and Margaret Gillan. Edited by Felicity Sparrow.