DIRECTOR’S
NOTES
Development
In September of 1997, Donovan Webster’s
book Aftermath: The Remnants of War won the prestigious Gelber
Prize and I approached him about turning his work into a documentary.
After several meetings and several months, he agreed to the idea and
the slow process of developing the project began.
Within a year I was joined by my partners, producers Ed Barreveld and
Michael Kot, and shortly thereafter executive producer Don Haig came aboard
to provide some much needed guidance.
By early 1999, they had persuaded Norm Bolen and Sydney Suissa of History
Television to help fund the documentary and convinced Peter Starr of the National
Film Board of Canada to look at the project.
Finally, by autumn of 1999, the Film Board had come aboard as had co-executive
producer André Bennett of Cinema Esperanca International, a distributor,
and we had distilled Donovan’s book into three parts: France, Russia,
and Vietnam. Storyline Entertainment
subsequently added a fourth and equally compelling component, Bosnia. Together, they would bridge the twentieth
century and her wars.
Production
In early May of 2000, we began the
worldwide production in Vietnam. The
crew consisted of myself, producer Ed Barreveld, cinematographer Michael Grippo
and sound recordist Adrian Tucker (producer Michael Kot was stuck in Canada
dealing with finalizing contracts, distribution, and calls from the field).
Vietnam was introduced to us via Saigon, a city
that rarely sleeps and which is populated by legions of motor scooters. It was also where the horrors of the Vietnam
War were made patently clear on our visit to the Tu Du Maternity Hospital.
The hospital’s research into dioxin poisoning – a residue
left over from the spraying of the defoliant Agent Orange – included
a room filled along four walls with hideously deformed fetuses.
Meanwhile, on the hospital’s fourth floor lived orphans, abandoned
because of deformities linked to Agent Orange. Heading north towards the old DMZ that once separated North
and South Vietnam, we visited a number of old battle sites including Khe Sanh,
where vendors peddle “authentic” dog tags. In the nearby village, a merchant buys
scrap metal such as unexploded shells, rusting helmets and anything else left
over from the war. A trip to
the remote Aluoi Valley near Laos revealed an ingenious use for another remnant
of war: aluminum drop tanks from American bombers which are cut in half and
used as durable canoes.
Flying on to Russia, we witnessed the
crumbling decay of communism as we made our way to Volgograd, formerly known
as Stalingrad. There we met up
with Valery Shtrykov, a colourful and enigmatic character who is hired by
Geman and Austrian veterans’ organizations to search for the unmarked
resting places of war dead. He
took us to a desolate part of the Russian Steppes and quietly began to scan
the ground. Then, finding some clue unseen by us,
he began to dig into the hard soil and unearthing the bodies of soldiers long
dead. Like a modern-day Hamlet,
Shtrykov would rise from his burrow with, first one skull, then another: two
soldiers who had beaten themselves to death with their rifles and who fell
together, into the ground, forgotten for almost sixty years. We were also introduced to Helmut Cronenbroeck,
a German veteran of the Battle of Stalingrad, making a pilgrimage to the area.
Visiting the site of a Luftwaffe airfield with him, we came across
scavengers digging into what had once been a command bunker, seeking war memorabilia
to sell on the black market. Near
the end of our visit, we were invited to witness a dinner at which Russian
and German veterans of the battle sat together for the first time.
After a brief return to Canada, we headed
for France, where we were to
join a team from the Interior Ministry’s Departement du Deminage as
they cleared unexploded shells from the First World War. A rainy morning found us in a forest northeast of Verdun, where
the ground was still pitted and cratered from the incessant shelling of 1916.
We were told to be cautious about where we trod as live munitions were
everywhere: there are ten million unexploded shells still lying in the ground. The rumble of thunder overhead was eerily reminiscent of artillery.
Hitching a lift in the team’s truck, Ed and I realized we were
sitting on a ton of live munitions.
Back at their base, Guy Momper and Henry Belot showed us their most
dangerous relics: rooms containing rusting shells filled with mustard gas,
chlorine gas and other chemicals used in war.
Guy opened the top of a jerry can to reveal the colourless fluid with
its faint smell of fresh cut grass: deadly phosgene gas.
Days later, the Demineurs led us deep into another forest and we found
ourselves walking through World War One trenches.
Barbed wire still lay atop the old parapets and the collapsing entrances
to dugouts were visible. As were
unexploded 75mm shells.
Finally we landed in Sarajevo, a city I was intimately familiar
with from my childhood. It was
at once the most comfortable and the most alien of any location we had yet
visited. The overwhelming presence
of UN and other personnel gave the city the feel of Berlin before the Wall
fell. There was safety in the
city but something else beyond it. On
a drive to a mountain vista overlooking the city, we realized that our young
Muslim driver was getting nervous. Slowly
we realized that he had never ventured outside the city limits, and certainly
never to a Serb part of the area. Sarajevo also left the most personal memory of the entire production,
in the form of a young Swedish Army officer named Bengt Olsson. Bengt had spent two years working with
Bosnian demining teams and took us under his wing. With his infectious grin and ready laugh, he would drive me
to the site where munitions were blown up, singing along to ABBA tunes in
his Land Rover. Over many pints
of Guinness at The Harp – a hangout for deminers – Bengt extolled
the virtues of patience and caution when dealing with land mines. “Cowards live forever”, as
he put it. But Bengt Olsson was
killed by a land mine barely three weeks after we said goodbye. I think of him often.
Daniel Sekulich
September 2001