Billy
McCannon

Documentary
made honestly.

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.

• Founder & MD, Amulet Studios — Dublin 8
• Member, Directors Guild of Ireland
• Founding Member, Film Base
• MA Fine Art, NCAD · Lecturer NCAD 2000–2009
• Galway Film Fleadh · Courmayeur · Boston Irish Film Festival