Documentaries by Dr David Redmon, emerging from a two-year Leverhulme Trust research grant award to his project titled ‘Donkey’, have been chosen to premiere at film festivals this year.

Do Donkeys Act?, narrated by Willem Dafoe, will premiere at CPH: DOX in Copenhagen in March 2017, whereas Sanctuary will premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) this month.

The IFFR is one of the largest audience and industry-driven film festivals in the world. It offers a high quality line-up of carefully selected feature films. The film Sanctuary evokes a safe haven for abandoned and abused donkeys. The camera seeks to establish direct contact with the animals in an interplay of trust, curiosity, and vulnerability.

Do Donkeys Act?, which explores inter-species relationships in our surrounding wider ecology, has been selected to premiere in competition for the DOX: AWARD (one of only 16 films) at The Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (CPH:DOX), the third biggest documentary film festival in the world. Each year, the festival fills Copenhagen’s cinemas with a selection of more than 200 films from around the world.

Dr Redmon is a Lecturer in Criminology in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research. His research interests include ethnographically recording experiential encounters and rendering expressivity with audiovisual and written mediums.