Date/Time
Date(s) - 09/11/2025
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Location
4010 JFSB
Category(ies)
The Humanities Center kicks off the fall semester with a visit from documentary film-maker, Alison Millar on Thursday, Sept. 11th at 3:00 pm in 4010 JFSB. She will present on the topic of storytelling, maintaining relationships in observational filmmaking, and the dual dark and light sides of the documentary filmmaking process. We hope you will join us.
Title: Authorship and Authenticity: Lyrical Storytelling, Relationships, and Representation in Observational Filmmaking
Observational filmmaking is built on relationships, on intentional immersion in communities. Community-based storytelling affords the possibilities of either oppression or empowerment—often a fine line to walk, depending on how relationships are approached and managed. When people see themselves in both the practice and outcome of the filmmaking process, these stories can build bridges of understanding, despite walls built to literally and figuratively divide communities. But doing this well requires a particular approach to managing the relationship within the storytelling process. Drawing from various films, including Lyra (which has won 18 international awards), The Disappeared, the soon-to-be-released The Disappearance of Captain Nairac, and her broad body of work distributed in various outlets (e.g., BBC One, Two, Four, RTE, TG4 and Channel Four television), award-winning filmmaker Alison Millar will unpack these issues and her approach to them. Millar will discuss how she has used landscape poetry to diffuse difficult topics, negotiated access and voice, managed vulnerabilities and positionality, and negotiated authorship and authenticity as she has sought to tell meaningful stories to both the communities in which she has worked and to a broader public.
About our guest:
Alison Millar is one of the U.K. and Ireland’s most respected documentary film-makers. She is a BAFTA, IFTA and Prix Italia winner as well as winning both the UK and Northern Ireland Royal Television Society award in 2016 for Channel 4’s Dispatches documentary “Kids In Crisis.” She is a critically acclaimed film-maker with a reputation for making both challenging and emotionally compelling films. In 2010, Alison founded Erica Starling Productions Ltd, an independent documentary production company in Belfast. Her celebrated and impactful 2022 feature film LYRA, about her friend and colleague, the murdered journalist Lyra Mckee, won over 13 International Awards including the Grierson, Prix Europa and the Tim Hetherington Award. In July 2025 her latest feature “The Disappearance of Captain Nairac” opened at Docs Ireland.
