In Journacide, Irish director, Seán Murray investigates Israel’s brutal ethnic cleansing of Lebanon and the ongoing targeted killings of journalists. Israel has killed more than 260 journalists and media workers since October 2023. While also detailing the wider policy of “journacide” in Gaza, Murray reflects on his own childhood in Belfast and the importance of storytelling as a weapon of resistance. Sherry Zane and Murra had a wide-randing conversatio about journalism, war, the counter-archive of bearing witness through murals, Ireland’s history of solidarity with Palestine, the importance of documentary filmmaking in an era of misinformation, and the media's responsibility to tell the truth.
Murray’s work can be found here: https://seanmurray.tv/
His 2-part documentary on Ireland’s far-right is available to watch on RedWolf Media’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@RedwolfMediaChannel
About the panelists
Seán Murray is an award-winning writer and director from Belfast. He has made a number of dramas and documentaries that have been screened both on broadcast TV and cinemas internationally. He is director of the Respect Human Rights Film Festival as well as The Guerrilla Film Club in Belfast. Murray’s work focuses on post-conflict / testimony documentaries that address legacy issues pertaining to the recent conflict in the north of Ireland. He holds a PhD in Political Documentary from Queen’s University (Belfast).
Sherry Zane is a historian, cultural critic and scholar whose research explores the intersection of visual culture, public memory, and feminist historiography. Her recent essay Michael Jackson, Palestine and the Erasure of Solidarity was published on Radical Books Collective. Her article “’I Did It for the Uplift of Humanity and the Navy’: Same-Sex Acts and the Origins of the National Security State, 1919–1921” was published in the New England Quarterly in 2018 and has since been featured in The MIT Press Reader and 19th News. She writes at The Lioness Archive’s Substack
