Lyra

Alison Millar’s latest documentary explores the tragic yet inspirational story of Lyra McKee, the idealistic Irish LGBTQ journalist.

Lyra McKee was the investigative journalist who was shot in the head and died in Londonderry on 18th April 2019. Alison Millar's documentary film is both a memorial to her and a plea that Lyra’s concerns be taken up by others. She was born in Belfast in 1990 and in 2006 won the Young Journalist award given by Sky News. Lyra had first turned to writing a couple of years earlier as a contributor to her high school newspaper and, when her career developed, she used journalism to express her deeply humane concerns about what she saw in the world around her. Thus, a major article, ‘Suicide of the Ceasefire Babies’, grew out of her anguish on recognising that the high rates of teenage suicide were a consequence of The Troubles that the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 had been unable to avert. It was Lyra’s strong sense of injustice that encouraged her to research unsolved killings from earlier times and she would write a book about the death in 1981 of the Belfast MP Robert Bradford at the hands of the Provisional IRA. Comparable concerns fuelled another book, one that she was writing at the time of her death: that was The Lost Boys which was concerned with the fate of two youths who lived in Belfast but disappeared in 1974 (it was to have been the first of two books for which she had negotiated a deal with Faber and Faber).

If Lyra’s tragic death at the age of twenty-nine hit the headlines, her story, that of an idealistic young woman, would have been worth telling even if it had not ended as it did. In choosing to present it in the form of a documentary feature film, Alison Millar clearly had the best of intentions and also had the benefit of close contact with the family (Lyra’s sister, Nichola Corner, is a key contributor here). It's also the case that there is no shortage of old photographs and video footage in addition to which there are recordings of Lyra's voice from such sources as dictaphones. Nevertheless, while Lyra makes a deeply sympathetic impression, the story that it tells does not readily lend itself to being shaped effectively as a feature film. A book divided into distinct chapters each with its own focus might have been a better medium for it.

As it stands Lyra is a work which seems to jump around far too much. It opens in 2013 before moving directly to the day of Lyra’s death and then going back to tell us about her childhood. But, even more disruptively, what follows keeps returning to 2019 and beyond in order to update us about any developments in the investigation into her death. Elsewhere, there are time jumps to earlier historical footage. It is, of course, entirely valid to include footage of Lyra meeting Janet Donnelly, a campaigner whose father was killed in the Ballymurphy Massacre of 1971 since Lyra's interest and her subsequent involvement in this matter are very relevant to illustrating her journalistic work. But, this being a film, we suddenly find actual news footage from 1971 being inserted and not long afterwards there is another abrupt time switch as a title informs us that the next passage is "11 months after Lyra's murder".

A clear portrait of Lyra does indeed emerge and that naturally extends to her experience of growing up as a lesbian in Belfast. But, although we see her partner Sara Canning, the film rather downplays any experience of homophobia Lyra had to face in her youth and, indeed, it takes some time before the film touches clearly on her crucial relationship with Sara. Later in the film we see a visit which Lyra made to America in 2017 during which she made a speech commenting on gay killings there. What she said then led on to references to homophobia as a cause of gay suicides, but it is typical of the film that this scene is in no way linked to the earlier footage about suicides in Ireland.

I stress these points because Lyra comes over as a rather messy film in the sense that the varied episodes in it, valuable in themselves, don't come together in a way that shapes the diverse aspects of Lyra’s story to good effect. There is a failure to organise the material in a way that enables it to flow and thus to carry the viewer along smoothly and with ease. But it is only fair to say that Lyra's life is so clearly an example to be admired that, even if it is easy to imagine a telling of it that made for more fluent and effective cinema, what we have from Alison Millar will still speak appealingly to many viewers. It will encourage them to take note of what Lyra achieved despite having a life that was tragically cut short and they will applaud her for it.

MANSEL STIMPSON

Featuring  Nichola Corner, Sara Canning, Joan McKee, Father Martin Magill, Phil McTaggart, Mike Tomlinson, Janet Donnelly, Laura Hassan and footage of Lyra McKee.

Dir Alison Millar, Pro Alison Millar and Jackie Doyle, Ph Mark McCauley, Ed Chloë Lambourne, Music David Holmes.

Erica Sterling Productions/Channel 4/Northern Ireland Screen/TG4-Wildcard Distribution.
92 mins. UK. 2022. UK Rel: 4 November 2022. Cert. 15.