Therapeutic creativity and the lived experience of grief in the collaborative fiction film Lost Property

This collaborative project aimed to represent the embodied experience of grief in a fiction film by drawing on research, and personal professional all involved: academics; an artist; bereavement therapists counsellors; actors, cinematographers, sound engineers other crew. By representing more phenomenologically minded manner, sought capture lived loss screen while contributing meaningfully discourse practice-as-research. Hay, Dawson Rosling used participatory action research investigate whether storying loss, it through narrative, images movement, is therapeutic. Participatory was beneficial facilitating changes co-researchers’ thinking, feeling practice, enabling participants inhabit multiple roles manner that expanded their disciplinary boundaries. However, project’s effect some demonstrated ways creativity meaning making can support adaptive grieving, also revealed risks using highly emotive topics such as grief.