Listen to the award-winning director and filmmaker Tor Bridges discuss using creativity as a force for positive change and social justice, and how this ethos has impacted her work.

Tor Bridges studied documentary film making in the States before moving back to the UK and joining the BBC as a researcher. She quickly became disenfranchised with the hierarchical, male and mercantile environment and left the organisation to pursue her career as a director. Joining forces with her husband, they set out to make documentaries which brought people’s attention to hard-hitting international issues. More recently, Tor was the executive producer for ‘Anna: the woman who went to fight ISIS’. The documentary is about Tor’s niece, Anna, who went to fight with the Kurds against ISIS and was sadly killed by a Turkish airstrike in the town of Afrin in northern Syria.

Tor believes passionately in the ability of documentaries as a force to inform and change people’s opinions. Her films contextualise the bigger picture by bringing in personal stories, as she believes it is the individual which will intrigue her audience.

In this podcast, Katie and Tor discuss the role of documentary makers in shaping and respecting the narrative of their subjects. They also explore how creativity can be a force for change and the need for more female voices in the filmmaking industry.

Watch ‘Anna: the woman who went to fight ISIS’: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006h6x

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