I'm always on the lookout for movies about real photographers, from dramas like Lee (2023) to documentaries like All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022). So my eyes perked up when I saw that H for Hawk (2025) had recently popped up on my Netflix homepage.
To be clear, its plot isn't about photography at all: it's the true-life tale of how English academic and naturalist Helen McDonald (played by Claire Foy) dealt with grief over her father's sudden death through training and bonding with a bird of prey.
But the father she's grieving for was a real-life photojournalist, and to my mind his story is just as interesting.
Alisdair Macdonald, who's played in the movie by Brendan Gleeson, spent 26 years shooting for one of Britain's biggest newspapers, the Daily Mirror, and also helped launch Today, Britain's first full-color national paper.
He photographed the Beatles from 1963 onward, travelling with them to Paris for their Olympia shows, and kept snapping the individual members well beyond their split in 1970. He picked up a World Press Photo award in 1989, in the humor category, for a shot of a workman fleeing a burst water main.
All of these details are subtly woven through this film in a way that adds extra emotional depth to the main character's sense of loss and grief.
This climaxes in the film's eulogy scene, in which Helen delivers a tribute to her father built around a slideshow of his own photographs. These are Alisdair Macdonald's actual images, many of which live on in the Getty archives today.
Work ethic
McDonald left school at 15, trained at Regent Street Polytechnic and was hired by the Mirror as its youngest staff photographer at just 20. By Helen's own account, he was the type to scope out a location then stand there for the best part of a day rather than risk missing the shot.
In the case of his shot of Charles and Diana kissing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace after their wedding, that meant a full 24 hours of not eating and drinking, after which he was dreadfully ill and nearly collapsed.
Macdonald didn't just apply this approach to professional life, but his own personal projects too.
Above: trailer for H is for Hawk
"At home, dad rigged up infrared beams over ponds to photograph bats swooping to drink, their complicated noses pressed to watery darkness," she once told Woman And Home. "One year he fixed a glass-backed nest box to the shed and photographed a pair of blue tits rearing their brood of chicks: the whole family was entranced."
Just to be clear, this is a movie about the daughter, not the father, and birds not photography: allusions to the latter are purely incidental to its main plot or themes. But as an example of a real-life drama hitting the right notes, both in terms of Alisdair Macdonald himself and his approach to photography, it deserves full marks nonetheless.
