Filmmaker working on documentary about Mennonites

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This article was published 21/08/2023 (1125 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Toronto filmmaker is on a quest to learn more about his roots.

“I’ve always had an interest in my Mennonite roots,” said Dale Hildebrand, who grew up in Halbstadt in southern Manitoba. “My wife encouraged me to explore them.”

He is working on a documentary about the arrival of Mennonites in Manitoba almost 150 years ago.

Hildebrand — who has won more than 50 awards for writing, directing and cinematography — plans to make a documentary that focuses on the journey of the first Mennonite emigrants from Russia to Manitoba.

“I want to focus on all the trials, tribulations, suffering and loss it entailed,” he said about their train journey across Europe, voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, and steamboat trip up the Red River from the U.S.

He also wants to show what it was like for them to set up new homes and communities in those first few years.

Hildebrand is using diaries and journals to help him tell that story.

“I want to tell real people’s stories,” he said, adding that includes stories of children dying during the journey. “I can’t imagine the hardship and heartache,” he said.

Conrad Stoesz of the Mennonite Heritage Archives in Winnipeg is pitching in.

“The early years were very difficult,” said Stoesz of the newcomers’ arrival to Manitoba. “The first winter was brutal,” Stoesz said. “They were not used to that kind of cold.”

In addition to the challenge of starting over in a new country, they experienced illness and death, Stoesz said.

One group of Mennonites that arrived in 1875 spent six weeks at Fort Dufferin, located near Emerson, before they could move to their new homes.

“They called it ‘a place of mourning,’” he said, since a child died of disease almost on a daily basis. “We’ve looked, but we still don’t know where those graves are.”

In the 1870s, 17,000 Mennonites left Russia because the Russian government broke its promise to let them have their own schools and be exempt from military service, Stoesz said. Seven thousand of them came to Manitoba.

“They left established farms and businesses, homes and family and friends, knowing they would never see them again,” he said. “They did it to start over.”

Hildebrand said he intends to explore the impact of the Mennonites’ arrival on Indigenous people. “I don’t want to whitewash anything,” he said of how Indigenous people lost land to the newcomers.

For Stoesz, the documentary is another way to tell the Mennonite story in Manitoba.

“It’s our history, we need to keep telling it, learn from it,” he said, adding it needs to be told in different ways as well.

“As historians, we need to think broader in our storytelling. We’ve done a good job at telling our stories through print, but many people today access stories visually, in images. The traditional textbook style will always be relevant, but we need to expand the ways we tell our own story.”

Hildebrand intends to premiere the documentary in Steinbach next summer to mark the 150th anniversary of Mennonites arriving in the province. He is also looking into broadcast options.

He has about 75 per cent of the funding for the documentary. The Manitoba government has contributed $75,000 and private foundations have also kicked in.

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