Jill Daniels is an award winning independent filmmaker whose films have been shown throughout the world.
She originally trained as a painter – some of her paintings can be seen here – before moving into film.
In 1989 she made the short feature I’m In Heaven, about a Jewish woman who, after an unhappy marriage, never leaves her high-rise flat and has retreated into a pastiche of Jewish ritual life. It won the prize for best fiction film at the Huesca Film Festival Spain in 1990.
Lost in Gainesville, 2005, follows the journeys, internal and external, of Mexican migrants, trapped between the hope of a new and more prosperous life and a yearning for the world left behind.
Small Town Girl, 2007, filmed over 5 years, follows the lives of 3 adolescent girls in 2 small post-industrial towns in England.
Not Reconciled, 2009 , explores the space between documentary and fiction through the voices of ghosts who tell the story of Belchite, a town in Northern Spain ruined in the Spanish civil war.
In 2011 she completed The Border Crossing, a film exploring memory and trauma in the Francoist Basque Country, and she has recently completed My Private Life, a film about secrets in her Jewish family.
In 2017 she completed Journey to the South, a documentary essay film which explores notions of what it means to be human.
Jill is currently working on a film about Rosa Luxemburg. As a prologue she made the short essay film Breathing Still (2018) in Berlin.