BILL DOUGLAS – MY BEST FRIEND

My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973), and My Way Home (1978) are a trilogy on hard-knock childhood of filmmaker Bill Douglas. A Scotsman, Douglas grew up with his maternal grandmother and a cousin, since his father wasn’t one willing to take care of his child, and his mother was locked up in a madhouse. Bill Douglas will fund his passion for cinema by collecting empty jars for the few pennies he needed to pay for a ticket. Once in the Royal Air Force, he was sent to Egypt, where he met Peter Jewell. The two, once back in London, collected filmmaking instruments now preserved at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum.
Considered the lone British neo-realist filmmaker, Bill Douglas made, apart from the trilogy, Comrades (1986). He died in 1991, aged 57. Thanks to exclusive archive footage Jack Archer’s documentary analyses the life of Bill Douglas, especially his maturity, since his childhood had been self-documented well enough.