Documentary Filmmaker — Dublin
Director · Amulet Studios
35 years telling stories that resist easy answers.
Work rooted in listening, shaped by Irish experience,
and made for audiences willing to sit with complexity.
Member, Directors Guild of Ireland.
Showreel
Amulet Studios · Dublin
View full channel on Vimeo ↗"We can only see Gaza when we can see ourselves there."
Selected Films
Feature Documentary · Development
2025 — present
Read more →
Oral History · Series
1999 – 2009
Read more →
Participatory Documentary
Ongoing
Read more →
35
Years filmmaking
10
Years inside Portlaoise Prison
DGI
Directors Guild of Ireland
Billy McCannon is an Irish filmmaker and participatory arts practitioner with over 35 years of experience across drama, documentary and community arts. He is the founder and managing director of Amulet Studios, a Dublin-based digital cinema studio, and holds an MA in Fine Art from NCAD, where he lectured in Fine Art from 2000 to 2009.
His short film Recoil (2004) won Best Irish Short Film at the Galway Film Fleadh, Best International Short at Courmayeur, Italy, and Best Short at the Boston Irish Film Festival. His dramatic short One More Shot (1996) was acquired by ZDF Germany, Showtime Australia and Tara Television USA.
A founding member of Film Base, he chaired the organisation during the successful campaign to establish the Irish Film Board, helping build the infrastructure that enabled independent Irish production to flourish.
From 1999 to 2009 he ran a decade-long participatory oral history project with former combatants in Portlaoise Prison, developing a methodology rooted in Theatre of the Oppressed that gave participants full ownership of their recorded stories.
His current feature documentary, Everybody Knows, follows global resistance to genocide in Gaza through the lens of Irish post-colonial identity. A parallel project, Boots on Backwards, examines Colombia's false positives scandal through the same participatory methodology.
Based in
Inchicore, Dublin 8, Ireland
Studio
Amulet Studios
Vimeo