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My Private Life

My Private Life is an autobiographical documentary that explores the lives of the filmmaker's socially repressed Jewish parents, Barbara and Bertie, who married when divorce was a stigma, and homosexuality illegal ─ and in the eyes of observant Jews, a sin. 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.

  • Jill Daniels
    Director
    The Border Crossing (2011); Not Reconciled (2009); Small Town Girl (2007); Lost in Gainesville (2005); Next Year in Lerin (2000 updated 2010) Fool's Gold (2005)
  • Jill Daniels
    Writer
  • Jill Daniels
    Producer
  • Piotr Karter
    Film Editor
  • Catalin Brylla
    Color Grading
  • Alan Gibson
    Music and Sound Editor
  • Barbara Daniels
    Cast
  • Bertie Daniels
    Cast
  • Peter Lande
    Cast
  • Raie Kaplan
    Cast
  • Wally Ribeiro
    Cast
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Feature
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 2 minutes 53 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    September 1, 2014
  • Production Budget:
    7,000 GBP
  • Country of Origin:
    United Kingdom
  • Country of Filming:
    United Kingdom
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    DVCam
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Premiere
    The Horse Hospital, London
    September 30, 2015
    Premiere
  • Athens International Film & Video Festival
    Athens, Ohio, USA
    April 8, 2015
    North America Premiere
    Documentary Feature Honorable Mention
  • Queen's Cinema, Belfast
    Belfast, N. Ireland
    February 11, 2015
  • Moving Image Research Centre
    University of East London, London
    October 21, 2014
Director Biography - Jill Daniels

Jill Daniels is an award winning independent filmmaker whose films have been shown throughout the world.

She began her career In 1989 with 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, an autobiographical film exploring memory and trauma in the Francoist Basque Country.

She lives in London and teaches film and video at the University of East London.

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