MARGO Harkin is the doyenne of Irish documentary film-makers, responsible for some of the most significant and influential non-fiction film work to have emerged from Northern Ireland in the past decades.
Modest, she says down the line from her home in Derry that her first film, the drama Hush-A-Bye Baby (1990), raised awareness rather than influenced changes in the law.
It's about teenage pregnancy, the deaths of babies in some well known cases, and the tricky debate on abortion. There is added topicality - albeit more than 30 years later - in light of the changes in the north's approach to abortion.
"People said to me that I subconsciously used my Catholicism but I didn't - it was very conscious and deliberate," says Harkin.
"I am absolutely pro-choice but sensitive to other views. I wouldn't claim Hush-A-Bye Baby had a significant effect on events but it contributed to the debate.
"In 1983 there was the first abortion vote in Ireland. It was a fractured time. The film is not a polemic but a contribution."
She moves on to relate an affecting story she featured in the film involving young girls - children themselves - one of whom faced an unbearable choice with an unplanned pregnancy.
Harkin says: "You see these two young girls talking. One, Dinky, says to her friend Goretti, 'Are you sure you're pregnant? You don't look pregnant.' The other says she wishes she had cancer, that that would be better than being pregnant."
She adds that she used her theatrical experience in this film. "I tried to make it real and drew on my Field Day [Theatre Company, co-founded by Stephen Rea and Brian Friel] experience. I liked working with actors."
Harkin respects the truth, in her fictional and factual films, and in life. Academics have occasionally misquoted her, she says, which must be irksome: "I do recognise myself in interviews, and in this film biography which I am just editing. But sometimes I've been misquoted."
There is no doubting the veracity of her film Bloody Sunday: A Derry Diary.
Harkin is a daughter of the Bogside, one of 16 children born to the woman who is, she says, her guiding star.
"My parents were living with my granny Bridget Harkin in a house which no longer exists; it's been knocked down. I have such vivid memories of that time. There was a shop selling shoes in the house which we called a club. People would come and try on a pair of shoes, then pay in instalments if they liked them. There were also Courtauld clothes which were exotic," she recalls.
On Saturdays, her parents would send their growing brood with some money to the chip shop.
She also remembers witnessing the horrific events of January 30 1972, the day now forever known as Bloody Sunday: "We couldn't believe what we were seeing. There was an eerie silence and people were coming down from the Creggan asking if we'd seen this or that person."
She moves onto the question of justice, again in the news as the British government presses ahead with proposals to protect soldiers - as well as paramilitaries - from prosecution.
"It think it's unbelievably wrong that the soldiers have not been charged with murder," she says of Bloody Sunday.
"You never forget or get over it if you've lost somebody but legal process could bring some sort of closure, and people need to know their family members were not criminals."
Harkin's documentary, Bloody Sunday: A Derry Diary (2006, followed in 2010 by a revised version), considers the slow legal process and the fall-out from the events of the fateful day in which 13 people died.
Harkin recalls that it was difficult to get the project funded. "Tony Blair announced a new enquiry in 1997 but it was controversial. British broadcasters had no interest in financing as they felt their audiences had no appetite for it," she says. However, in the end she gained "a little money" from RTÉ and financial support from a German broadcaster.
It was an important film to make on many levels. "It was a totally difficult film to make but a film I was meant to make, as I was there," she says.
"This was a chance to find out what did happen. None of us understood exactly what happened on the day."
Ideally Harkin says she would have interviewed everyone involved. Certain people were key to her project and she pays tribute to the Nash family: "I loved them. They were very generous and allowed me to film them even though it's not easy having a camera crew following you about."
Veteran journalist Eamonn McCann was a consultant on the film, which she says overran its budget "many times".
However, it isn't her favourite work because "I ended up participating in it as the German company said that audiences would relate better to it if I did".
Harkin herself gave evidence to the Bloody Sunday Inquiry and agrees that Northern Ireland as a society still suffers from a collective post-traumatic stress disorder.
"Unless you were living in a protected place, everybody suffered. I was in London from 1981-2 and every time I heard a loud bang, I reacted or ducked."
She also recalls, after studying at art college in Belfast, teaching at a large school in the Creggan: "The school had bullet holes and there were regular gun battles outside."
By way of a lighter contrast, Harkin says that she particularly enjoyed producing the 2008 film, Waveriders, about surfing culture and following the big wave.
They went to the west coast of America, filmed in the west of Ireland and told the story of the Irish enthusiast who introduced the sport to the world. Harkin says that her earliest memories of enjoying film also feature on-screen adventures. "We watched Westerns at the fleapit cinema. They were very exciting but in my family, we all wanted to be the Indians."
When not filming, Harkin says that she enjoys a glass of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc in the evening. She likes watching cookery shows such as Masterchef ("anything with food") as well as cooking for real - home-made ratatouille is on the menu the evening we speak.
Widowed more than 15 years ago - her husband Kevin O'Carroll died suddenly from a heart attack in September 2005 - Harkin says that today she enjoys her work and family.
She is aiming to do a four generation photograph with her daughter and grandson soon: "He's called Cormac, then Kevin after my late husband - my mother, who is 95, says we'd better hurry up..."
Interestingly, Harkin, who naturally misses her grandson in Australia, indicates that parental over-praise can be a dangerous thing. She says that if parents over-praise their children's brilliance, possibly against evidence, it does nobody any favours, "Because then they can't take it when you criticise their work."
The one thing you need in Harkin's business, as she notes, is an ability to work hard and the determination to get any given project right.
"Danny Boyle said film-making is easy if you do what you're interested in," she says. "But you have to really want to do it."
::After Image: Margo Harkin will be available to watch online as part of the Docs Ireland festival from August 25-29. Tickets are free but must be booked in advance at docsireland.ie.
