A Tribute to Isabelle McNeill and her Video Essay "Drones in the Banlieue"

The loss so young of Isabelle McNeill (1979-2025) left her friends and colleagues grieving deeply. I was fortunate to work with Isabelle during our PhD years, when we coordinated the Cambridge University Film Seminar together. Isabelle was a creative, energetic, and ethical collaborator. She was already a uniquely generous intellect and her scholarship on cinema, cities, and memory went on to offer new pathways for research and thought. Isabelle’s video essay, Drones in the Banlieue, exemplifies her creative-critical intelligence and ethical conviction. It offers a surprising and moving perspective on drone vision in the context of the French banlieues, pushing against standard frameworks of surveillance and domination to discover instead intimacy, agency and shared belonging. I will try to situate the concerns and achievement of Drones in the Banlieue in relation to some of Isabelle’s other work while reflecting on her ethos as a scholar.