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. Her latest work Journey to the South, a documentary essay film which explores notions of what it means to be human was recently reviewed in Filmuforia Jill Daniels has been making films for over twenty five years. Her films have been shown throughout the world and she has won numerous international awards. She teaches filmmaking at the University of East London. |
“Documentary award winner Jill Daniel’s poetic and often banal voyage of discovery takes her south to the French Riviera where in Menton and Castellar she discovers the villa used by writer Katherine Mansfield and kicks over the traces of a mysterious unsolved murder.
Very much in tune with Agnes Varda’s Cannes outing Faces, Places (2017), Daniel’s leisurely piece randomly engages with the French inhabitants she meets along the way. The photos and diary recollections of Katherine Mansfield give this piece a rewarding historical context as she alights upon ordinary life in rural France. Journey to the South is an artist’s meditation on life and death, on creativity and carving out a more satisfying future away from the gilded trappings of the past.” ---Meredith Taylor, Filmuforia |
Selected Works* Journey to the South is a compelling poetic documentary about a village, Castellar, in the south of France. Katherine Mansfield struggles to write her stories, Pierre, a murdered shepherd reflects on the need to bear witness and the life of the village goes on. Daniels’ film is a rich meditation on past and present, on life and death, on creativity and what it means to be a human being.
* AHRC Film Awards at Bafta: My Private Life II was nominated for the Innovation Award. The judges called the film ‘innovative and moving’. |