Presents: Margo Harkin, Radical Witness

In this episode of Film Ireland Presents, we chat with Margo Harkin, an accomplished and masterful filmmaker who has been directing and producing fiction and documentary work for over forty years. Her films span all aspects of life on the island of Ireland, from chronicling Northern Ireland’s political history, to examining the systemic oppression of women, to exploring the healing power of creativity, and much more beyond. The Irish Film Institute has curated a wonderful retrospective of her seminal works, available to watch back on their player now.Listen now on SoundCloud, Apple, Spotify, Acast and Amazon, or subscribe to Film Ireland wherever you get your podcasts.Radical Witness Retrospective at Irish Film InstituteAfter graduating in Fine Art from the Ulster College of Art and Design in 1974, Harkin worked as an art teacher and community worker in socially deprived areas of Derry. She joined Field Day Theatre Company in 1980 as an Assistant Stage Manager on Brian Friel’s Translations, before going on to work as a stage designer for the company.In 1984, Harkin co-founded Derry Film & Video Workshop with Anne Crilly and Trisha Ziff delivering critical perspectives that ran counter to the censored narratives then broadcast by British and Irish television. The signal works of this period were Mother Ireland (1988), Anne Crilly’s controversial documentary about feminism and Irish republicanism, and Harkin’s own Hush-A-Bye Baby (1990), a feature drama about teenage pregnancy following the 1983 abortion referendum in Ireland.Harkin established Besom Productions in 1992 making educational films for Channel 4 but her reputation as an astute, local documentarian of injustices was soon forged through a series of highly regarded television documentaries. Her cinema films, the surf documentary Waveriders (2003), by Joel Conroy (which she produced), and Stolen (2023), about the plight of unmarried mothers in Ireland in the 20th century, provided thoroughly researched, compelling accounts of their subjects. Margo Harkin is a member of Aosdána. Her work has won countless awards and is widely taught to third-level film and media students.Over the years, the podcast has featured acclaimed guests such as Phyllida Lloyd, Lenny Abrahamson, M. Night Shyamalan, John Boorman, Saoirse Ronan, Colin Farrell, Aisha Tyler, Colm Meaney, Paul Reiser, Niamh Algar, David Freyne, Ciarán Donnelly, Joshua Oppenheimer, John Crowley, Niamh Algar, Gene Stupnitsky, and Terence Davies, alongside many of the most influential voices working in film and television today.So make sure to subscribe and listen back! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.