Sam Jackson’s Secret Video Diary takes the form of a quality British television documentary. Although the events depicted are drama and not real life, the story behind its making is truly “beyond fiction”.

The actress who plays Sam Jackson, Posy Miller, died of acute leukaemia on Christmas Eve, 2002. She had secretly filmed the diary entries for Molehill Productions in the months before her death, as a TV drama promotional tape never intended for broadcast. Her friends only discovered this at, or after, her funeral.

The original promo was made by a very small team who all grew quickly to know and love Posy. When they showed her family and friends the rushes after her death, they all agreed it was her best surviving work. Inspired by this reaction, eventually Producer Guy Rowland re-imagined the whole project as drama, masquerading as a documentary.  With a new story built around the centrepiece of Posy’s tapes, the next of kin granted their wholehearted consent. Many of Posy’s actor friends - who knew nothing of the project when she filmed it - filled new roles in the film.



Unbelievably therefore, we believe that the final movie is the first ever film where the lead actor has died before the start of principal photography.

The same small production team that made the original diary was augmented by a TV documentary crew to create the believable aesthetic that the film now required, and filming ran throughout 2004.  Following its world premiere at the Raindance Film Festival in London in October 2005, this least likely of all films garnered a British Independent Film Award. However, complex music rights negotiations delayed a commercial release, finally achieved on December 28th, 2007.



Sam Jackson’s Secret Video Diary is a permanent tribute to a brilliant actor and an extraordinary person who had a profound effect on everyone she met – enough in Molehill’s case to make an "impossible" film.