Lyra

This is a well made documentary on the life, career and death of Lyra McKee.

Ms. McKee was killed during a protest in 2019 when a police reform protester fired a .22 pistol in direction of riot police hitting Ms. McKee. I remember in my city in the US a very similar incident a bit over a year later, when an anti police protester during the same type of anti-police 2020 riots in the US, threw a brick at police hitting and permanently blinding a bystander. Also in summer 2020 in the US we had police shot at by the same type of "police reform" rioters and others hit as well.

This film is well paced. One gets a sense of the victims life and challenges, and her achievements accomplishments, and lost potential.

While the broader global context of the disgusting anti police views of the violent protesters, be they those in this film or the Molotov throwing Antifa type thugs we broadly saw in the US in summer 2020, or the people committing violence arson elsewhere in Europe at the time, is present and implicit, that context could have been more broadly explored.

Lyra McKee was a young campaigning Northern Irish journalist, murdered by paramilitaries for sticking her nose in where they didn't want it stuck. As is the way in the modern world, one of her skills was self-promotion, which means there's a fair amount of material to feature in this film, which is unquestionably hagiographic in tone. But there does seem to have been a lot to admire in McKee a fierce sense of justice and determination, supported by an inner confidence and self-belief that depended not one whit on privilege. She comes across as a force of nature, someone well aware of the evils of the world yet personally uncynical. All murders are tragedies; in McKee's case, we also lost someone who might have done a lot of good for the world, if only she had been allowed the chance.