Life through a lens:
Using the power of film to amplify unheard voices
For Professor Michele Aaron, the social and political value of films is fundamental to her research.
Amplifying the voices of unheard groups in society has become increasingly important to Michele, and using film as a mechanism to achieve this is central to her work.
From undertaking a BA in English Literature, through to a PhD in contemporary film and fiction, to working with end-of-life patients, to running a successful annual film festival, Michele has carved herself a rewarding and colourful career in academia.
The growth of film studies
“After my English Literature BA at Queen Mary’s, University of London, I did my Masters degree and PhD at the University of Southampton. My work at this time was focused on questions of cultural politics and social and sexual agency in literature and film. This was in the 1990s, when queer theory and queer cinema were taking off, the film and television industry was experiencing significant developments and film studies was really growing in the UK.
The 1990s was also a period of important social change in relation to AIDS activism and gay rights in Western culture. It saw the birth of New Queer Cinema, and Michele would later publish the first book on this topic in 2004.
She continues “In 1997, I got my first job as a film lecturer at Brunel University, before moving to the University of Birmingham in 2004 and joining the American Studies department to teach film. As I’ve always been interested in the historical and political and cultural context of film, that worked really well for me.”
Contemporary film and cultual production
Michele’s inaugural book, ‘The Body's Perilous Pleasures: Dangerous Desires and Contemporary Culture’, was released in 1999. Focusing on contemporary film and fiction, it explores the construction of the body, both within cultural production and as a cultural product itself, and its 'dangerous desires.'
“I think that was always my fascination” explains Michele, “The mismatch of people's love of popular culture and watching stuff that is often illegal, unconscionable or unethical in real life, but relished through film.”
In the years that followed the release of her first book, Michele published numerous other books and papers on topics including queer cinema, spectatorship death in film, and film ethics. Her monograph, “Death and the Moving Image: Ideology, Iconography and I,” won the Kraszna Krausz Foundation Best Moving Image Book Prize 2015. It argued that mainstream film determines human worth in relation to race, gender and able-bodiedness
Igniting change through film
Michele’s research now focuses on the potential of film to affect and catalyse personal, social and political change.
By the mid-2010s, Michele decided that she wanted to go beyond what she describes as “the traditional academic role” - and her ambitions led her to “try something a bit different.”
“I wanted to be involved in producing something, to stop criticising the films out there and start creating audiences for more important or transformative works. So in 2015 I started a film festival.”
"I wanted to start being involved in making films that shared the truth of people’s difficult experiences, rather than turning them into entertainment.”
Screening Rights Film Festival (SRFF) had its tenth and final edition in 2024. Initially held across venues in Birmingham, it grew in 2018 to encompass Coventry, following Michele’s move to the University of Warwick. Where other festivals were cancelled during Covid-19, she delivered an especially powerful online edition in 2020. Featuring films on human rights and social justice issues, the festival was designed to foster connections within and between communities and to shift people’s attitudes through film.
She continues “But I also wanted to start being involved in making films that shared the truth of people’s difficult experiences rather than turning them into entertainment.”
Telling the
missing stories
In 2016, she commenced a new research project collaborating with a Midlands hospice. It involved working with a filmmaker to help amplify the voices of patients receiving end-of-life care. Six powerful accounts of lived experience were co-created through this ground-breaking project.
“It was important to tell their stories because it's exactly their stories that are missing in film and television. You've got Hollywood fantasies, where people do ridiculously heroic or physically impossible tasks in the period before they're about to die.
"So, my project was about telling the truth of the end-of-life experience, and this proved incredibly valuable for the palliative care community. It also allowed me to explore how film, and its ‘ethical praxis’, could be used to air tricky topics in society.
“In 2019 I gained extra funding to share the films with the international end-of-life community and to make them available to this community via the ‘Life:Moving’ website and the training resources it contains. A clinical toolkit was designed with my colleague Dr Jed Jerwood, an art psychotherapist and palliative care practitioner.
"Together with the creative toolkit, these aim to increase understandings of end-of-life experience, and open up what can be difficult conversations about death, and enable hospices and community groups to replicate the project. The Life:Moving website is now hosted by Compassionate Communities UK.”
Giving a voice to
stigmatised
communities
Michele is currently working on two research projects that use ethical praxis to tell vital but difficult and overlooked stories. The first of these is entitled ‘Cine-semitism and Solidarity’ and is designed to “shift the narrative of Palestinian versus Jew.”
She explains “This is such an important topic. I feel very strongly that there aren't stories about Palestinian-Jewish solidarity in mainstream media. I wanted to collect and generate stories that aren’t about our violent opposition, and to use film to capture human connection and co-resistance. The project involves collating existing film footage, as well as a filmmaking project with student activists.”
Giving a voice to ‘unpopular’, stigmatised or silenced communities is key to Michele’s work, and her other upcoming project involves making films with the LGBTQIA+ members of the end-of-life community in Birmingham.
“It’s great to be working with Compassionate Communities UK and repeating the Life:Moving project with this specific group, which we know experience discrimination within the public health and palliative care system. These stories need to be told, and they need to be used. But I’m also looking forward to exploring how participatory film practice can be queered – can break with convention to capture and celebrate these individuals’ lives” says Michele.
"These stories need to be told, and they need to be used."
Professor Michele Aaron
Film and Television Studies
School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures
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