Midge Mackenzie

Who was Midge Mackenzie?

Midge MacKenzie was a London-born writer and filmmaker who first become notable for producing Robert Joffrey's multimedia ballet Astarte with the Joffrey Ballet, and with Women Talking, a documentary with interviews of Kate Millett, Betty Friedan and other leading figures in the US women’s liberation movement.

After reading the work of psychoanalyst Ellis Miller, MacKenzie started exploring the meaning of her own childhood and from this came Prisoners of Childhood in which actors brought out themes of pain and damage from early years. She made the wonderful I Stand Here Ironing based on the Tillie Olsen stories, and later a trilogy of films looking at remote communities in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Saving Faces documented the patients whose faces had been reconstructed by surgeon Ian Hutchison, who is the chief executive of the charity Saving Faces. He recalls, ‘She followed us around absolutely silently and made a film that said so much.’