Black Liberators WW2 (2021)
d: Adrian Callender
role: visual researcher
Facing rejection and discrimination at home, a brave contingent of Black Canadian and Caribbean soldiers steps up to fight for freedom overseas—risking their lives on the front lines of World War II to defeat fascism and claim the equality they were denied.
notes on the work //
Building the archival world of “Black Liberators” was a feat of true creative collaboration. To build the wall-to-wall archive that this story required, our little team brought in 45 minutes of archival material from over 50 sources. Our two-person team touched every single element of this project.
Almost every frame was animated with visual archive, including the dramatic recreations and visual animations. That means that in addition to offering the director archival material to work with, we worked to source elements that could be manipulated by our incredible animation wizards quickly and on-budget. Navigating three streams of archival material – animations, personal, and historical – was challenging, but we created a process that worked for us and bit off each piece at a time.
Working in the throes of the global pandemic, we were immediately challenged with limited access to archive houses and a slower-than-usual turnaround rate. To add to that, the impetus to make this film – to illuminate stories of Black liberators that went untold – was ironically one of the biggest challenges we faced when wrangling archival material. Not surprisingly, Black stories are not well captured in the visual historical archive. What to do when there’s a hole in the record? Cue, personal archive.
Every family has this person. As a visual researcher, I know this job well. You are responsible for holding on to the moments, the person who has a plan if there is a fire or a flood and you’ve got to “clear frame”. You are the de facto protector of your family’s most prized possessions: the family archive. On Black Liberators WW2 we were grateful that Kathy Grant had taken up this role in her own family, protecting and collecting archival footage about her father, Owen Rowe, and his colleagues, where others did not. In her journey she created the Legacy Voices Project and has become a public historian – it is generous and necessary work on her part. The historical record and this project are made better for it.
As our own internal d-day approached, we worked closely and tirelessly to lock and license material. With a few loose licensing components in the air and an inability to turn up at the door of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation (no matter how much we may have wanted to) the final weeks of BLWWII were hectic. But, as it often happens, the loops closed just in time and we breathed a sigh of relief and excitement when the show aired on November 11, 2021.
As the lead researcher on this project, I relished the opportunity to learn from Erin Chisholm, who graciously and deftly mentored me through some of the research’s hardest moments. Without Erin, it would not have been possible.