Showing her roots
On everyone’s family tree,
there’s always a branch sprouting a couple names with remarkable stories behind them. In the case of Toronto-based filmmaker Penny Wheelwright, it was a woman named Esther, related to Penny’s great-great-great ( etc.) grandfather, whose story would eventually drop off the family tree and land on the screen.
“Growing up, I’d always heard about the crazy nuns in my family,” says Wheelwright over a late lunch at Spring Rolls. “But it wasn’t until my cousins said, ‘ Why don’t you make a film about her?’ that it occurred to me to do that.”
Captive: The Story of Esther, airing tonight on Vision, is part-dramatic re-enactment, part-documentary. It tells the story of Esther Wheelwright, who in 1703 was kidnapped from her home in Maine by a native Abenakis tribe and forced to march 200 kilometres through dense forest to a settlement in Quebec. After finally adjusting to a new way of life, she was released by a Jesuit missionary and relocated to a convent where she would eventually renounce her Protestant roots for Catholicism and become the first English-speaking Mother Superior of the Ursulines.
It’s quite a mouthful to relate, especially inbetween mouthfuls of spring rolls and a dish Wheelwright thought would be a Vietnamese bun, but which was actually some beefy stirfry thing, but the film runs smoothly.
The biggest hurdle was pitching the project to financiers and broadcasters, who are generally hungry for other fare.
“ You have to find that balance in any film — focusing on a subject that will sustain your interest as well as the broadcaster’s,” says Wheelwright, who tends to specialize in women’s issues. “It’s not exactly easy to sell the story of an unknown Canadian woman ... If you don’t have sex or violence, you don’t get funding.”
But she did, in the end, and it might have something to do with a trend toward biography. “That genre is really peaking now, but it’s mostly for old stories we’ve all heard before,” she says, hinting perhaps at the A&E biographies or recent movies like Ray. “There isn’t much of a market for smaller characters.”
But this might change, Wheelwright adds, especially as historians are writing more and more about captives, examining journals and reports that hold similar stories of human triumph. Esther, she says, is just one of many Canadian heroes who exist in history books and aren’t common knowledge — but should be.
“ She essentially lost two families and was in the middle of this extreme religious battle, and yet she emerged so sweet and strong, never malicious or spiteful,” she says. “ I have so much respect for her, and I think people today can still learn from her story.”
Airs tonight at 10 ET on Vision and tomorrow at 11 p.m. ET.