Third year Film Studies student and investigative journalist Fran Hughes reports from the screening of Lyra (2022) at Coventry Cathedral, about the murdered Northern Irish journalist Lyra McKee. The film was accompanied by a panel chaired by Professor Helen Wheatley (Director of Film and Television Studies) with Lyra's sister Nichola McKee-Corner and brother in law John Corner, the film's producer, Jackie Doyle, the Rev Dr Alex Wimberley (leader of the Corrymeela Community) and Professor Michele Aaron. Fran attended the screening as a recent recipient of the Centre for Investigative Journalism's Lyra McKee Bursary Scheme, and writes about the experience of watching the film and meeting Lyra's family

Penny Siopis’s films write histories that are markedly alternative. Combining family home movies, amateur or documentary found footage with sound and a written text presented through subtitles, her films tell untold or censored histories. They speak to (auto)biographical concerns and widely shared experiences of colonialism, war, Apartheid, migration, globalisation, and ecological crisis, all the while standing out as strong aesthetic/affective experiences beyond the historical, and as art objects in dialogue with a number of traditions. Here, I am most interested in producing an understanding of her films as a specific form of post-medium cine-writing. My interest is not purely formal, for the cine-writing in Siopis’s films is not independent of the stories they construct; it is a mode of writing beyond-the-book, born of the task of telling history otherwise. By working through her paragrammatical, scripto-visual style, my discussion will circle in particular around the unspeakable film subject produced by her work.

Stephen Gundle will deliver the concluding keynote address at the 'Fellini: Italy, the Cinema' international conference on Wednesday 23 June.