It was at St Martin's that she entered the world of independent film, working with lecturers/film-makers and video artists including Malcolm Le Grice, William Raban, Anna Thew, Tina Keane and Vera Neubauer and studying alongside film-makers Richard Heslop, Martine Thoquenne and Isaac Julien.

Working alongside Arts Council/Channel 4 award winning film-makers Jean Matthee “Descent of a Seductress” (1987) and Anna Thew “Behind Closed Doors” (1987/8) at the London Film-makers Co-operative, Camden, and Four Corners film workshop, Bethnal Green, Sandra Lahire made ‘’Uranium Hex’’(1987), for Channel 4/Illuminations “Ghosts in the Machine” [4] ‘’Serpent River’’,1989, explored the toxic effects of a uranium mining corporation, owned by Rio Tinto Zinc, on the residents and inhabitants of Serpent River and Elliot Lake in Ontario, Canada.

The second part of the Plath trilogy, ‘’Night Dances’’, 1995, presented Hebrew inscriptions on worn gravestones and allusions to Yom Kippur through which Lahire explored Jewish aspects of her identity.

The body, always that body that is coming near the image of a spectre, that is connected solely with 'air and bones' while minimizing the flesh to zero, is also the primal element she uses to establish her relationship with her surroundings, particularly with a landscape destroyed by pollution or nuclear waste.” Grzinic also underscores the centrality of light and sound in her works, with which “she recreated emotional situations and connections between personal obsession(s) and social structures.”[6] An essay by Lahire, Lesbians in Media Education, appeared in the anthology Visibly Female: Feminism and Art, edited by Hilary Robinson in 1998.

[7] She also wrote an essay for Coil Magazine "The Fairies Banquet", 1999, on Sarah Pucill's film Swollen Stigma (1998) who was her fellow filmmaker and partner at the time.