Project Detail

The Border Crossing

Synopsis

In this evocative and unique experimental documentary, award winning filmmaker Jill Daniels explores her memories of violence 30 years ago hitchhiking through the Basque country. She searches for the places she hopes will jolt her fading memory. Merging past and present, documentary and fiction she recreates her journey. Diving further into this world she discovers other women, Maria and Aitziber, also changed by violence. Maria is a photographer who lives alone and has survived a car crash but her niece was killed. Her dead father was sentenced to death in the civil war in Spain and she holds close his prison diary. Aitziber is a young Basque nationalist who spent five years in prison and for five days after her arrest was tortured by the Spanish police. Together these stories, build a mosaic of impressions of the past and present. As Daniels comes to the end of her journey she realizes she can't be free of the past. She has come full circle.

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Details

Year: 2011
Type of film: Shorts
Running time: 47 mins
Format: DVCAM
Director: Jill Daniels
Producer: Jill Daniels
Editor: Jill Daniels
Screenwriter: Jill Daniels
Director of Photography: Jill Daniels
Sound: Lauren Daniels
Music: Alia Schaefer
Principal cast: Sian Paddock

Genre

Experimental Woman Director

Production Status

Complete

Production Company

High Ground Films

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Framed through a letter to the Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, RESISTERS is a celebration of Berlin's 100 years of resistance to fascism and a call to action against nationalism. Taking a two-fold journey through Berlin, a geographical one and a psychic one, Daniels Jewish flaneuse reflects on Berlin's turbulent history of revolution and resistance to fascism, and the dangerous growth of the nationalist AfD who became the main opposition party in the German parliament in 2017. Resisters follows the activities of the Omas Gegen Rechts (Grandmothers against the Right) who organise to fight the nationalist AfD which in 2017 became the strongest opposition party in the German Parliament. In poetic vignettes Daniels' voice, over slow-motion shots of streets and parks recounts the stories of resisters to fascism before and during the Third Reich. The fictionalised re-imagining of herself as witness to resistance brings into the light what may be still repressed and hidden.

Experimental Woman Director

Not Reconciled

Director: Jill Daniels

Year: 2010

During the Spanish civil war and its aftermath, thousands of people were executed and thrown into mass unmarked graves. Today people in Spain are beginning to face up to a past that has remained for 70 years an uneasy alliance of a determination to forget. In Not Reconciled, historic accounts of the civil war, novels, diaries of republican and fascist fighters, are combined with observation of the everyday lives of the villagers. <br /> <br /> The voices of the ghosts of Rosa and Carlos, young Spanish civil war republicans echo over the ruins of Belchite in Aragon, Northern Spain as they wait for the discovery of their unmarked graves. They tell the story of the town, talk about their part in the fighting, quarrel and make up, discuss philosophy and history and women’s rights and the terrible aftermath of the civil war. The sounds of wind, the echoes of voices, the crumbling ruins, the slow silent walks of tourists and the seeming oblivion of the present day town next door to those who lost their lives, are overlaid with conversations by the film maker with present day Belchite inhabitants as she tries to penetrate their indifference.

Woman Director

Small Town Girl