Author: Lyn Spooner

  • Ackroyd & Harvey: The Art of Activism (2025)

    When does practice become protest? Or protest, poetry? An intimate portrait of internationally acclaimed artists, Heather Ackroyd & Dan Harvey, who work at the intersection of art, activism, biology and ecology, and their quest to shake humanity into action on climate catastrophe – whatever the personal cost. Intrinsically bound up in protest, the film follows…

  • Only Make Believe (2019)

    New York is one of the greatest cities in the world, and the most diverse. It also has an increasing number of chronically ill children in hospitals, special schools and care facilities. This film is about Only Make Believe (OMB) founded by Dena Hammerstein, which creates interactive theatre for these children and their families, as…

  • Groundswell (2018)

    We owe our entire existence on this planet to six inches of top-soil and the fact that it rains.  There are more living creatures in a handful of soil than humans on the planet.  But we’re running out of soil. We’ve lost 40% of arable land worldwide in the last 45 years. Luckily there is…

  • Croc-a-Dyke Dundee (2014)

    SBS Australia Croc-a-Dyke Dundee is about Dawn O’Donnell, a pioneering figure in Sydney’s LGBTQ+ scene. It explores her life as a former ice skater who built an empire of gay bars, clubs, sex shops and other establishments in the 1970s and 80s, a time when homosexuality was illegal. The film delves into the mythology surrounding…

  • Kenya Murder Mystery (2009)

    Channel 4 UK and The History Channel The latest film in the consistently superb True Stories strand is particularly prescient — it gives a detailed insight into the trail of Thomas Cholmondeley, the aristocratic heir (Delamere family) to an immense colonial estate in Kenya, accused of murdering a poacher in 2006, who was found guilty…

  • Girls On Tour (2002)

    Released in 2002, Girls On Tour enters the most exclusive girls club in the world, the Sanex WTA women’s tennis tour, where women are treated like princesses and the top players are all millionaires. Anna Kournikova, Jennifer Capriarti, the Williams sisters and Martina Hingis have all achieved fame and fortune on the tennis courts, but…

  • Toxic Queen (1997)

    SBS Australia A film portrait of David Mcdiarmid, an interdisciplinary artist who played a pivotal role in shaping Australian visual culture in the 1980s and 1990s. He was a dedicated gay liberation activist; his personal politics were inseparable from his art. His work explored and celebrated his own sexual identity while scrutinising the stigmatisation of…