Projects matching: Jill Daniels

Synopsis

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.

Synopsis

Jill Daniels’ autobiographical film explores the secrets of her emotionally repressed Jewish parents Barbara and Bertie, who were married in the mid 1940s when homosexuality was illegal and divorce in the eyes of observant Jews, a sin. During the course of their long lives Barbara and Bertie moved from house to house, country to country, through divorce, remarriage and physical violence. Moving from house to house, country to country, through divorce, remarriage and physical violence rich one day and broke the next Barbara and Bertie spend their last days together in a small flat in suburban London. Daniels films her parents in their small flat while dramatically charged re-enactments hint at a hidden narrative of physical violence and sexual ambivalence. Daniels fails to confront her parents’ about their secrets and it is only through the privacy of the filmmaker's voice that she can dispute the authenticity of their recounted memories.

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.

Synopsis

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.

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.

Synopsis

Shot over five years, a unique and humorous portrait of three girls growing into adolescence, set against the harsh realities of life in two small poverty stricken towns at either end of England. As it unfolds the girls behaviour changes in surprising, touching and sometimes tragic ways.

Synopsis

Hector was eight when his father brought him to Gainesville, in the heart of the American south. Olga was 12 when her father swam the Rio Grande with her on his back. Thomas was 16 when his mother put him on a bus alone, with a bag of tacos for the 2,000-mile journey. Lost in Gainesville retraces their journey, as they tell their stories of growing up among lost hopes and dreams, in a town where work has dried up, where fascists march against them and where rich whites live out lives of faded glory.

Synopsis

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 in the American deep south; the Cherokees were rounded up and force-marched to the west in the 'Trail of Tears'. In a moving portrait, Fool's Gold peels away the layers of affluent colour-co-ordinated shops, cafes and big cars to reveal a community, where people like Myra and Thomas, live out life untouched by the prosperity of tourism, who struggle with poverty but share the little they have with others.

Synopsis

In 1948 during the Greek civil war, 28 thousand children, Greek and Macedonian, were taken from their villages by the communist-led Democratic Army and raised in orphanages in Eastern Europe. The Greeks never allowed the Macedonian children back. 50 years later the 'children' marked the anniversary of their journey. They dance and sing and yearn for their lost villages. The Greek civil war has faded into history, but the Macedonian 'children' remain its forgotten victims.