Film Review: Journalist Lyra McKee's own voice will carry through the ages
Journalist Lyra McKee who was shot and killed when guns were fired and petrol bombs were thrown in Londonderry, Northern Ireland.
- Lyra
- ★★★★★
Opening in Derry in 2019 in the midst of a riot in the Creggan during which investigative reporter Lyra McKee was shot dead, (12A) is a documentary from Alison Millar that explores Lyra’s life against the backdrop of post-Troubles Northern Ireland and a fabled peace that is, in Lyra’s words, ‘a peace that doesn’t disrupt the lives of the middle classes'.
Born in 1990, and child of the Troubles, Lyra grew up in the Ardoyne and experienced at first hand many of the issues she would go on to investigate as an award-winning freelance reporter, which include entrenched poverty, rampant levels of suicide and the inevitable consequence of despair in a fragile society. It’s a grim story, and not least because we know how it ends (the film is in part a story of the attempt to bring her killers to justice), and yet, courtesy of endless hours of home movie footage and audio from Lyra’s podcasts, the mood is largely optimistic and upbeat as Lyra’s own words take centre-stage.
A tireless campaigner for LGBTQ rights with an irrepressibly bubbly personality and an insatiably curious mind, Lyra became something of a spokesperson for a Northern Ireland that might yet emerge from the post-conflict years. Already a BAFTA, IFTA and Prix Italia winner for previous films, Alison Millar refuses to sentimentalise Lyra and her mission statement of ‘disrupting the status quo and fixing what’s wrong’: instead she simply allows Lyra to speak for herself, and the result is one of the saddest and simultaneously uplifting films of the year.
(cinema release)
