The Rest Is Story (Ostrowék/Tengeru/Montréal, 1940-2020)
Jonathan Durand (CA)
Between 1942 to 1952, roughly 20,000 Polish refugees lived in more than two dozen refugee camps spread out across what were then the British Colonies of Uganda, Tanganyika, Kenya, Northern Rhodesia, and Southern Rhodesia. The refugees were overwhelmingly women and children, and were survivors of large-scale deportations of Poles from Soviet-occupied Eastern Poland to Siberia between 1940 and 1941. Unable to safely return to Communist-occupied Poland in 1945, the Poles stayed on in the camps until they were eventually resettled, primarily in England, Canada, and Australia. Several hundred of them ended up in Montreal, where the Church of St. Michael and St. Anthony on rue St. Viateur became a gathering point for many of the former refugees. Outside of the oral history of the survivors, kept alive within their families and a scattered community, the story was largely forgotten.
In 2018, filmmaker Jonathan Durand released the documentary Memory Is Our Homeland, which sought to piece together the historical fragments to frame his family’s stories of having been Polish refugees in Tanzania. The Rest Is Story (Ostrowek/Tengeru/Montreal, 1940-2020) presents a small selection of artifacts and documents collected over the course of researching and making the film, ignoring the distinction between family records and historical archives. Framed by excerpts of oral testimony and storytelling, these elements are shown not only as a means of not only drawing attention to a compelling story about wartime displacement and trauma, but to the complex issues raised in trying to document the history of European refugees in colonial Africa.
Memory Is Our Homeland (2019) | 91 min | Canada
Jonathan Kolodziej Durand (CA) is a filmmaker and artist based in Montreal. His documentary “Memory Is Our Homeland” (2018), pieced together over a decade of travel, research, and filming, premiered at the RIDM festival in Montréal, and has been screening internationally at festivals and museums since. In February 2020, the film was shown at Poland’s national Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk, as a commemorative screening on the 80th anniversary of the beginning of Soviet deportations of Poles on February 10, 1940.