|
You are visiting > home > news > article
World traveller creates TV series about ethnic women
by By SHERI SHEFA, CJN Intern, Canadian Jewish News, 8/31/2005
After having travelled the world for 17 years, from Israel to Russia to England, and being exposed to many different cultures and ethnicities, Susan Poizner was worried that coming back to Canada would be too boring.
When she told a friend that she felt nothing in Canada could compare to the multicultural diversity that England had to offer, he assured her that there are “amazing ethnic groups” all over the country.
Soon after, Poizner, a journalist who loves to write stories that focus on initiatives to create bridges between ethnic communities, decided to turn her passion for different cultures into a project that would expose others to it.
Mother Tongue: A Woman’s History of Ethnic Canada, a 13-episode television series, is the product of her passion.
“The two goals [of the series] are to look at women’s history and to look at the role women played in Canada and to look at the role ethnic people played in our past as well,” Poizner said.
“The original concept was so different from what it is now,” said the 39-year-old. She added that, at first, the focus of the show would incorporate women’s stories and cooking.
“I felt that maybe cooking and talking about recipes was a way in delving into history. So I was working on the idea of an ethnic cooking series.”
In the process of developing her concept, she came in contact with professors of ethnic and women’s history in Canada.
“It turns out that there is not enough educational material or audiovisual material that talks about ethnic groups. The idea then slowly developed into this idea of a women’s history of ethnic Canada,” Poizner said.
“It turns out that women played an incredible role in our past, as did ethnic communities.”
Each episode focuses on a woman from a different ethnic group. The cultures featured are Italian, Muslim, Ukrainian, Woodland Cree, Russian Doukhobor, Chinese, Japanese, Finnish, Acadian, Rwandan, Vietnamese, African and Jewish. Poizner documented family history as far back as 1645, and each story is told by a descendant.
While she said it is very difficult to choose a favourite, she did say that the most difficult one to make was the Jewish episode.
“To choose the story was challenging because I know too much about the culture. I grew up in the culture,” said Poizner, who attended United Synagogue Day School in Toronto’s Forest Hill area as a child.
“I thought I can’t do justice to a Holocaust story, so I was avoiding that, but it was really challenging to find the right story because there was an overload of information and not enough objectivity. But in the end we got a lovely story, which was very inspiring.”
The Jewish episode tells the story of Sarah Mayoff, a woman who grew up in The Main – essentially, a Jewish ghetto in Montreal.
There was a lot of anti-Semitism in Montreal at this time, Poizner said, but no matter what, Mayoff refused to give up.
“Can you just imagine, she’s waking up and going downtown to St. Catherine’s Street, where Jews just did not spend time. She got a job in an insurance company there and she built up a really impressive career at a time when Jews were not in the insurance industry, and certainly women did not make it big. She became one of their top sellers,” Poizner said.
Mother Tongue, which took three years to complete, began to get funding after “a year and a half of banging on doors and being rejected.”
“Interestingly, every time I gave up, I would say, ‘God, I worked really hard on this and maybe it’s just not meant to be.’ I said, ‘That’s OK, but just show me another door, open another door and I’ll go somewhere else.’”
She said that just as she would pull back from the project, she would get a sign to keep going.
Despite the fact that funding was hard to come by, Poizner knew that this was a subject that had never been filmed before and thought she would have to show people what an episode would look like.
She managed to get some funding from tourism boards to document the story of Eliza Ann Parker, “a runaway slave and freedom fighter involved in an armed uprising against slavery in Christiana, Pa., in 1851,” but ended up footing much of the cost to produce it herself.
Her break came when Heritage Canada agreed to fund her project. Since she completed the series, Poizner has continued to bang on doors to get broadcasters such as Canadian Learning Television and SCN, a network out of Saskatchewan, to air her series. TVOntario aired her pilot, but declined to pick up the rest of her series.
“I’ve done all this work and I want people to see it,” she said.
Poizner hopes that the series will create a more tolerant society and a better understanding of different cultures.
“Ultimately, our cultures are beautiful and we’re all human, we’re all different, but we’re all the same underneath. I know that even within the Jewish community, there is a fear of outsiders. Some Jewish people are brought up with the idea that you can’t trust anybody if they’re not Jewish,” said Poizner.
“Let’s love each other’s cultures, appreciate them, disagree where we need to disagree, but not personalize it. I think that is a more peaceful approach to life.”
The first episode of the series airs on Canadian Learning Television on Sept. 15. The Jewish episode runs on Nov. 21. For more information, visit www.mothertongue.ca.
|
|
This series of educational videos was made possible with funding from
|
Mother Tongue: A woman's history of ethnic Canada is a 13-part TV series that documents Canada's multicultural history from a female perspective. Each program tells the story of a notable woman in one of Canada's communities, including a Black fugitive slave, an Acadian mail order bride, and an Icelandic suffragette.
mother, tongue, woman, history, ethnic, Canada, video, DVD, TV, tele, television, series, show, think, stock, inc., canada, ontario, british, columbia, quebec, education, school
|
back to news
All rights reserved.