We are very sad to learn that Professor Joram ten Brink has passed away. Joram was a much-admired colleague in Westminster School of Arts from 1989 until 2017, and a key member of CREAM at its inception. In 2017, he retired with a debilitating illness from which he never recovered.

CREAM members and University of Westminster alumni have very fond memories of working with Joram on cross-institutional projects in our sector, including the AHRC-funded AVPhD. He was an inspiring teacher and larger than life character who did much to support film culture in higher education, as his colleagues and many former students will testify. At Westminster, Joram taught on the BA in Contemporary Media Practice and BA Film and Television. He was also instrumental in setting up CREAM’s practice-based PhD programmes in the early 2000s.

Joram came to film via musicology and visual anthropology. He became an award-winning filmmaker (Jacoba; The Man who Couldn’t Feel; Journey Through the Night), whose research explored documentary and the essay film, culminating in conferences, articles and the books Building Bridges: the cinema of Jean Rouch, and Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory and the Performance of Violence. He also led the ground-breaking AHRC project Genocide and Genre, through which Joshua Oppenheimer’s feature documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence were developed, with Joram as a producer on both films.

Our thoughts are with his beloved family, Atalia and Na’ama ten Brink, at this time.