My friend Gael Dohany, who has died aged 73 of cancer, was a film-maker whose dramatised documentary Occupy! chronicled the work-in at a Merseyside factory in 1972 when Fisher-Bendix announced that it would move washing-machine production to Spain, axing 500 jobs.
Born and brought up in Buffalo, New York state, the only child of Effie (nee Leonard), a business studies teacher, and Joseph Dohany, a manager at American Motors, Gael received a Catholic education at Buffalo Seminary, and went on to complete a master’s degree at Columbia University, New York.
She subsequently met and married in 1966 a British graduate, Gavin Alderson-Smith, later an anthropologist, and the couple moved to Montreal in the mid-1960s, where both undertook further study in preparation for their academic careers. It was there that I first met her, when we both were graduate teaching assistants on a course in Chinese history taught at McGill by the renowned Chinese-Canadian academic, Paul Lin.
Gael had always been interested in still photography and when shortly afterwards she and Gavin moved to Britain to study for their PhDs, she began to think of representing the social issues she had researched academically through the medium of documentary film. An opportunity arose in 1971 to go to China and spend five weeks on a people’s commune. Borrowing equipment, Gael was able to record the lives of China’s peasants at first hand in what became the film Daily Life on China’s Communes. Though broadly positive in tone, the film, released in 1974, did not shy away from showing the problems people faced.
A year or so later she accompanied Gavin to Peru, where she took the opportunity to record footage on the struggles of the peasants in the village of Huasicancha in south-central Peru. Following a long and difficult period of editing, this material finally appeared in 1979 as the documentary The Foxes’ Earth, and in the same year in Spanish as Tierra o Muerte (Land or Death).
The film for which she is perhaps best known, however, is Occupy! (1976), partly funded by the BFI, and made in the two years immediately following her divorce. In this she sought to capture the anger and frustration of workers in Kirkby, whose protracted occupation of their factory was a landmark in the history of British industrial relations. Gael’s film broke new ground in combining actual documentary footage with dramatised passages staged by young actors from the Liverpool Everyman theatre company, including Pete Postlethwaite, Julie Walters and Bill Nighy.
Occupy! was shown in Edinburgh, in Toronto and at Cannes, and remains a milestone in the radical film-making of its era. It exemplifies her approach as director, producer, editor, and (on her other films) camera operator too: self-taught but highly professional, with a deep commitment to and belief in collective action as a means of resolving the challenges of life.
In later years Gael returned to Buffalo to look after her elderly and ailing parents; her mother, who died in 2009 aged 106, attributed her long life to Gael’s attentive care.
She is survived by her cousins and a close group of childhood friends.
