Some time after her death, film director Jill Craigie (1911- 99), re-opens an old suitcase, prompting memories of the extraordinary life and loves of this forceful, charismatic woman, whose work has been long neglected. Craigie was one of the first women to direct documentaries. Working outside the British Documentary Movement in the 1940s and early 1950s, her films such as To Be Woman (1951), on equal pay, and Out of Chaos (1944), the first film about artists at work, featuring Henry Moore and Paul Nash, tackled new subjects for the cinema through a unique blend of drama, polemic and humour. Independent Miss Craigie uses the director’s unseen papers, and her films, to reveal her energetic struggles to get her radical projects made and distributed, including her last one, on the Yugoslav conflict, made when she was 83, with her husband, former Labour leader, Michael Foot.
Michael Foot was a British politician and served as the leader of the Labour Party from 1980-1983. He was a pacifist and a supporter of CND who studied philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford. As a documentary screenwriter for the war effort in the 1940s, he worked alongside Frank Owen under the joint pseudonym of Michael Frank and was known for Young Veteran (1940), Yellow Caesar (1941). He was married to documentary filmmaker Jill Craigie.