Emma Davie (United Kingdom)

Emma Davie’s films explore innovative approaches to narrative structure and the relation between form and ethics. She has made a wide variety of documentaries for national and international broadcasters, most recently the feature I Am Breathing (2012), which received a Scottish BAFTA for Best Director and was screened in over 50 countries, What Age Can You Start Being An Artist? (2004, for BBC Channel 4, shortlisted for a Grierson), Gigha, Buying Our Island (2002), and Flight (2000, BBC/Canadian coproduction). She teaches at Edinburgh College of Art where she runs the post-graduate course in Documentary Film, and also works as an independent mentor and advisor on film projects, giving regular workshops and seminars internationally. Emma has served as a documentary programmer for the Edinburgh International Film Festival, was on the board of the European Documentary Network, and has written widely on documentarymaking practice. Her interest in collaboration, explored in Becoming Animal (2018), stems from a background in performance theatre: for many years she ran a performance company that specialized in immersive large-scale shows incorporating performance and film, and also collaborated with directors such as Robert Lepage, working with Peter Mettler for the first time as an actress in his film adaptation of Tectonic Plates (1992). Emma was educated at Oxford University where she studied English literature, and then studied theatre in Paris.