Billy McCannon · Amulet Studios · Dublin
35
Years filmmaking
10
Walls Behind Walls · Portlaoise Prison
MA
Fine Art · NCAD
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 films have won awards at the Galway Film Fleadh, Courmayeur International Film Festival and the Boston Irish Film Festival, and have been broadcast on Channel 4, RTÉ, 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 developed the Walls Behind Walls project in Portlaoise Prison — a decade of filmmaking with former combatants using 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.