Joram ten Brink, 1952 – 2022

NAHEMI would like to send its deep condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of the late Joram ten Brink and acknowledge his huge impact on film and media education and to this organisation. Two of our executive pay personal tributes below:

I’d like to pay tribute to Professor Joram ten Brink, the inspiring film maker, scholar and educator who died recently at the age of 69, after a long illness.

He was born in Israel soon after his parents moved there from Holland, but returned to Holland to study for a BA in Musicology and an MA in Visual Anthropology, and then came to London to study film. He began teaching at Harrow College of Art in the late 1980s and then at the University of Westminster when the two institutions merged. I’ve known him for 19 years as a valued colleague, and I had the pleasure and privilege of teaching documentary production to final year BA students with him from 2011 to 2016. He was an inspiring teacher and executive producer: humorous, rigorous and original.

He set up the practice-based PhD programme at Westminster in the early 2000s and led the University’s Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM). He was also the architect of the cross-institution AVPhD network. His films include ‘Jacoba’ (1988), which explores the survival of four of his family in Nazi occupied Holland, hidden for three years in their neighbour Jacoba’s house, using performances by family members to reconstruct the past.

His research into documentary and the essay film led to conferences, articles and his book ‘Building Bridges: the cinema of Jean Rouch’. He rescued and made accessible the film archive of the Arts Council through an AHRC funded project, and he also led the ground-breaking AHRC project Genocide and Genre which culminated in Joshua Oppenheimer’s feature documentaries ‘The Act of Killing’ and ‘The Look of Silence’ (both produced by Joram), and their book ‘Killer Images: documentary film, memory and the performance of violence’.

 Joram is survived by his wife Atalia, also a film maker, and his daughter Na’ama.

Peter Hort, University of Westminster

I would like to add to Peter's tribute and thank Joram for being such an outstanding film educator and pioneering spirit. As a friend to Nahemi he would willingly volunteer to chair sessions at Talking Shop and contribute searching questions to both presenters and students. He also played a key role in the restoration of the Regent Street Cinema which has hosted many of our events in recent years. His generosity of spirit will be sorely missed.

Claire Barwell, former Chair of Nahemi