Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies continues its 2022-2023 series with a screening of the award-winning documentary film, Lyra. Directed by Alison Millar, Lyra is an emotive, intimate portrait of the life and death of Belfast journalist Lyra McKee, who was murdered by the New IRA the day before Good Friday in April 2019. The film seeks answers to her senseless killing through Lyra’s own work and words. The screening will take place Friday, February 24 at 4:30 p.m. at the James Stewart Film Theater at 185 Nassau Street. Following the screening, Millar will join in conversation with Visiting Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters and Chair of the Fund for Irish Studies Fintan O’Toole. The event is free and open to the public; no tickets are required. The theater is an accessible venue, and guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week prior to the event date.
A still from Alison Millar’s award-winning documentary film, Lyra. Photo courtesy of Alison Millar/Erica Starling Productions
Lyra tells the story of McKee’s tragic death by a stray bullet during New IRA riots in Derry, Northern Ireland. Attending a riot in the Creggan estate near where she lived, McKee had been reporting events as they unfolded via Twitter, even in the final moments before she was shot in the head. Her death caused outrage throughout Ireland and beyond, and Millar recalls, “The whole of Ireland came to a standstill when she was killed.” The powerful film, which is narrated by McKee’s own voice, conveys with heart-wrenching irony that the determined young journalist became a victim of the very violence she wrote about in the hopes of reaching a new generation with the truth of affairs in post-conflict Ireland.
Millar, a colleague and close friend of McKee, was approached by the McKee family following her death to create a film that would share the story of the inspiring young journalist with the wider world. Using McKee’s own interview tape recordings along with audio rescued from voice notes, mobile phone recordings, and home videos, Millar and her team pieced together a film that historically places McKee’s death while powerfully fleshing out the passion, curiosity and ambition that characterized her life and work.
Since its release, the documentary has won numerous awards including the Audience Award at the 2022 Cork International Film Festival, the Tim Hetherington Award at the 2022 Sheffield Doc Festival, the Gryphon Award GEX Doc at Italy’s Giffoni Film Festival, and Best Feature Documentary at Achill Island Film Festival.
The film runs approximately 90 minutes and will be followed by a 30-minute discussion with the filmmaker.
Filmmaker Alison Millar. Photo by Jess Lowe
Millar is a critically acclaimed filmmaker with a reputation for making emotionally compelling films. She began her producing and directing career at the National Film and Television School in the U.K. in the mid 1990s. Since then, she has produced over 40 films for British and Irish television and has won a BAFTA, IFTA, Prix Italia and numerous other awards. In 2010 Millar founded Erica Starling Productions, an independent documentary production company based in Belfast. In addition to Lyra, her other award-winning documentary features or series include Lee Miller — A Life on the Frontline; Arena: The Changin’ Times of Ike White; The Disappeared; Leonora Carrington: The Lost Surrealist; Searching for Shergar; Dispatches: Kids in Crisis; Love and Death in City Hall; the series Find Me a Family; and The World: The Shame of the Catholic Church.
O’Toole’s books on politics include the recent best sellers We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland and Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain. His books on theater include works on William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Thomas Murphy. He regularly contributes to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Granta, The Guardian, The Observer, and other international publications. In 2011, The Observer named O’Toole one of “Britain’s top 300 intellectuals.” He has received the A.T. Cross Award for Supreme Contribution to Irish Journalism, the Millennium Social Inclusion Award, Journalist of the Year in 2010, the Orwell Prize, and the European Press Prize. O’Toole’s History of Ireland in 100 Objects, which covers 100 highly charged artifacts from the last 10,000 years, is currently the basis for Ireland’s postage stamps. He has recently been appointed official biographer of Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney.
The Fund for Irish Studies is chaired this year by O’Toole and affords all Princeton students, and the community at large, a wider and deeper sense of the languages, literatures, drama, visual arts, history, and economics not only of Ireland but of “Ireland in the world.” The lecture series is co-produced by the Lewis Center for the Arts.
Information about the lecture series events can be found on the Fund for Irish Studies website. Additional events scheduled for the spring semester include:
- Fintan O’Toole (Princeton University) delivers the Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture on “Uneasy Peace: The Good Friday Agreement 25 Years On” on March 31
- Elizabeth Boyle (University of Maynooth) lectures on “Fierce Appetites: Lessons from My Year of Untamed Thinking” on April 14
- Mary Burke (University of Connecticut) lectures on “Race, Politics and Irish America: A Gothic History” on April 21
The Fund for Irish Studies is generously sponsored by the Durkin Family Trust and the James J. Kerrigan Jr. ’45 and Margaret M. Kerrigan Fund for Irish Studies.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events, most of them free, presented each year by the Lewis Center for the Arts.
