Full steam ahead

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This article was published 14/12/2020 (2116 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A television period drama about the lives and challenges of Black railway workers, promising to be the biggest Black-led production ever in Canada, will commence shooting this spring in Winnipeg.

It’s an appropriate location since, a century ago, Winnipeg is where the first Black railway workers union, the Order of Sleeping Car Porters, was formed in response to the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway Employees union’s segregationist policies.

Tentatively titled The Porter, the eight-episode series will be produced for CBC and BET+, the streaming service of the American cable network Black Entertainment Television.

While Winnipeg may be important in the history of the union, the city’s locations will be substituting for other urban centres, such as Chicago, Detroit, and especially Montreal’s “Little Burgundy” district, known at the time as the “Harlem of the North.”

The film will be produced by Toronto’s Sienna Films and Winnipeg’s Inferno Pictures with an entirely Black-Canadian creative team, including directors and executive producers Charles Officer and R.T. Thorne and writer-showrunners Annmarie Morais and Marsha Greene. Cecil Foster, author of 2019’s book about Black porters, They Call Me George, is a consultant on the film.

“The Porter is more than a healthy dose of history. It’s a bold, sexy, unapologetic look at Black ambition,” Morais said Thursday in a statement.

“Manitoba Film & Music is honoured to be involved in a project of this cultural magnitude” says Rachel Rusen, CEO and film commissioner of MFM. “We value the producers’ commitment to an exclusively Black creative team of writers and showrunners to bring this important chapter in Canadian history to the screen.

“This production will also actively do advance work to attract underrepresented technicians, crafts people and logistics personnel for training and mentorship opportunities. The Porter will feature Winnipeg iconic architecture as Chicago.”

Ian Dimerman, producer at Inferno Pictures says the show has the potential to return for many seasons to come.

“The stars aligned and CBC and BET have decided to move forward with this really special story. If it finds an audience, I think you could see some longevity there for sure,” he says, adding that the show, as a period piece, will be costly, but will be all the more important to give a shot in the arm to a production industry that has been suffering because of COVID-related shutdowns and postponements.

“I think you’ve also got an industry here that is jittery, because they’re worried with the current health order,” Dimerman says. “I think it sent a really positive message to the industry here, to our stakeholders here, both crew and cast, and all of our vendors that we’ve got an exciting project to kick off 2021.”

Dimerman says the show will start prep in late winter and will likely commence filming this spring.

“The film industry has done an unbelievable job pivoting in this pandemic, figuring out protocols to return back to work safely,” he says. “I think it should get easier as vaccines get distributed, but it’s a wait-and-see.

“Every week brings new and interesting challenges,” he adds. “But I think the industry has done a really good job of transforming to comply and work with these challenges, as we always do in film. Things happen. You find solutions.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing