films

The Border Crossing

2011, 47 mins.
In this innovative 47 minute film set in the Basque country, award-winning filmmaker Jill Daniels creates an evocative story of her own past through the wanderings of a young woman on both sides of the French/Spanish border while an unnamed man drives through the rain at night. Maria and Aitziber, two generations of Basque women, talk movingly to Daniels about the Spanish Civil War, Basque prisoners and the continuing violence in the Basque country.

Not Reconciled

2009, 41 mins.
Rosa and Carlos, the ghosts of young Spanish civil war republicans, roam the ruins of Belchite in Northern Spain, waiting for the discovery of their unmarked graves.
Featuring the voices of Jose Antonio Garcia and Judith Mora Toral

Small Town Girl

2007, 94 mins.
Shot over five years, a unique portrait of three adolescent girls, it shows the harsh realities of life in two small towns at either end of England at the start of the 21st century.
A truly wonderful and poignant documentary. The portraits of these girls are so intimate and beautifully realised. MadCat Womens International Film Festival

Next Year In Lerin - New Version - 2010

2000, Beta SP, colour, 45 mins.
The stories of Macedonian children taken from their villages in Greece during the Greek Civil War. The Greek civil war has faded into history, but the Macedonian ‘children’ remain its forgotten victims.

Lost In Gainsville

2005, 41 mins, 60 mins.
Hector, Olga and Thomas came from Mexico to the American south, in search of the ‘American Dream’. Lost in Gainesville hears their tales of lost hopes and dreams, in a town where work has dried up, fascists march against them and where rich whites live out lives of faded glory.

Secret Heart

1994, 16mm colour, 25 mins.
Alice, Helen, Lynn and Julie have learning disabilities and it’s hard for them to communicate verbally.  Now they play Celtic harps and sing to live audiences.  For them, music says what can’t always be spoken; to feel what can’t otherwise be felt and creates a space where they will be heard.

Fools Gold

2002. BetaSP. Colour. 55 mins
Dahlonega;  60 miles north of Atlanta;  Myra is part Cherokee, a cleaner in the local hotel.  She and husband Thomas and unemployed son Terry live in a trailer park.  In 1828 gold was found in Dahlonega;  The Cherokees were rounded up and force-marched to the west in the ‘Trail of Tears.’ Today Dahlonega is a rich town living off that history.

Exiles

1991, 16mm, colour. 40 mins.
Ruben House is a Jewish old people’s home.  Sixty people live intimately, side by side.  They measure their days by meal times where salt and sugar are passed reluctantly and pills are taken unwillingly; by keep fit classes and film shows; by Biblical quizzes whose answers are unknown, forgotten or irrelevant.

Spirits

2003, BetaSP, Colour. 5 mins.
A homage to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Spirits  explores the undercurrents of fear and violence when two opposing worlds collide.  Shot in a remote corner of Greece using slow motion, extreme close ups and point of view shots, Spirits  creates a metaphorical world of paranoia which builds to an unsettling climax.

I'm In Heaven

1989, 16mm. Colour. 28 mins..
Rachel is Jewish. She lives alone in a council flat in a tower block. Never leaving the flat, she has retreated into a life of obsessive domestic routine.  When her mother dies Rachel becomes fixated with two men searching for treasure on the building site opposite. Winner of best fiction film, Huesca Short Film Festival, Spain, 1990.

Killing Time

2000. BetaSP. Colour. 3 mins
  “My life was pretty fully. I had a hard time keeping an eye on it.  But then around that time I started getting the phone calls.  He left them on my answer machine.  Strangely enough, though he knew my name, I had no idea who he was….”l

Skin Deep

1997, Beta SP colour, 45 mins.
A tragi-comic portrait of Daniels’ Jewish Grandmother. Now 100 years old, she emigrated from Romania to England when she was 8.  Forbidden from marrying the man she loves she is forced into an arranged marriage then overwhelms her son with her suffocating love. Denying his homosexuality he escapes her into an early marriage.