Speaking
Liz Smith speaks from her work as an investigative filmmaker and writer. Her talks draw directly from sustained inquiry into power, rights, and the structures that shape public life — grounded in specific cases and resisting abstraction.
Areas
Power and Human Rights
On the structures that constrain rights and the mechanisms through which they are contested. Drawing on fieldwork across multiple countries and films that follow rights violations from the ground level to the institutional.
Protest, Law, and Democratic Dissent
On the narrowing of democratic space and the legal instruments used to police dissent. Examining the relationship between legislation, policing, and the lived experience of those who organise publicly — drawing directly from The Line We Crossed and the Requiem for Protest series.
Documentary as Investigation
On the practice of investigative documentary filmmaking: what it means to follow a question rather than a story, how to work ethically in environments of risk, and what the form can and cannot do. For film schools, journalism faculties, and organisations working at the intersection of media and rights.
Current Talk
The Omnicrisis: Power, Truth and Division
A narrative lecture on the idea that we are living through a single interconnected ‘omnicrisis’, bringing together clips from the documentaries to enter the worlds of people on different sides of the most contested issues of our time. Commissioned by Derby Museums and first presented at Derby Museum & Art Gallery in October 2026.
→ About the talkBiographical Notes
50 words
Liz Smith is an investigative documentary filmmaker and writer. Her work examines power, human rights, and democratic dissent. Her films include The Line We Crossed (2025), The Conspiracists (2025), and I Am Gen Z (2021). She writes on Substack on disinformation, protest, and public reality.
150 words
Liz Smith is an investigative documentary filmmaker and writer working on the frontlines of human rights. Her films move between the immediate — protest lines, courtrooms, streets — and the structural, tracing how systems of power sustain themselves and how people organise in response.
Her recent feature films, The Line We Crossed and The Conspiracists, examine the policing of democratic dissent and the architecture of modern conspiracy culture respectively. Her earlier feature, I Am Gen Z, offered a portrait of a generation navigating political and climate crisis across multiple countries.
Smith also writes on Substack, extending her film work into essayistic form — on disinformation, solidarity, and the contested nature of public reality. She speaks on the intersections of documentary practice, human rights, and the structures of power that shape lived experience.
Enquiries
For speaking invitations, panel participation, and academic engagements, please get in touch directly.
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