A recent film festival on Jersey used locations that reflected the island’s history, including the years it spent under German occupation during World War II. Christine Finn had a very personal reason for attending.
I have just been to a film screening in a place where I played as a child. Nothing unusual except the venue was a vast complex of underground tunnels, built by forced labour.
Designed to last the 1,000 years of Hitler’s Third Reich, it is one of the most stark reminders of Nazi occupation in the Channel Islands.
We film-goers walked in through the same rounded entrance where a photo of me, with my mother, was taken when I was about four.
I remember thinking then it was a dark, forbidding place. And that was before I learned how much the people working on these tunnels had suffered, hewing out some 44,000 tonnes of rock to make this impregnable fortress.
The film they were showing, fittingly enough, was a moving documentary about rehabilitation after modern conflict.
Sitting in the dark on this chilly autumn evening, live music enhancing the images, the occasional evocative sounds of planes overhead, I thought of the many stories which are contained here.
Retreating into cinema
And of course I thought of my mother. She had actually had to live with the enemy on Jersey and she died without telling me her memories.
“My favourite photo shows my parents on an evening out… off to see a movie maybe”
But she introduced me to cinema, and had given me the idea of a mission amid my festival film-going.
For her, film was always an escape. She retreated into cinema, often taking me for company.
I learned to love film. And these site-specific, or almost site-specific, screenings are what I love best.
To me, a visit to a foreign country means foreign cinema, no matter if I do not understand it.
In Spain, I swayed out of that homage to Cuban music, Buena Vista Social Club, into the swirling couples of a street fiesta.
I saw the salty, 1930s film Man Of Aran in a small hall on the Aran Islands of Ireland, emerging into a face full of Atlantic spray.
This year, I was with the Oscar winner Tilda Swinton, pulling a mobile cinema through the Scottish Highlands bringing Brigadoon to the glens.
In Jersey for the film festival, I followed the wartime steps my mother had taken around the capital St Helier.
Back then, the cinemas were swathed in swastikas and the films shown were mainly Nazi propaganda and newsreels.
The rules were firm: German soldiers were to sit on one side, islanders on the other. It was hardly a fun night out, but some romance and at least one post-war marriage were controversially kindled amid these seating arrangements.
‘Booing prohibited’
I was ushered backstage at the opera house, another place they had festival screenings, to meet veteran projectionist Kevin Lewis, who once bought one of Jersey’s beloved old cinemas.
He found the symbol of a German eagle burnt onto a locker in the projectionist’s room. There was also a hand-painted sign which read: “Members of the public are strictly prohibited from hissing and booing when Herr Hitler and Herr Mussolini are on the newsreel!”
Between my film going, I pored over microfiche in the library, looking through movie listings in the archive of the Jersey Evening Post.
I was looking in particular for the 1945 classic Powell and Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going. The film was being shown at the festival. It is a favourite of many people, including the director Martin Scorsese.
The film’s upwardly mobile central female lets her soup go to waste as she chatters away about herself. I wondered how her character would have been received in wartime Jersey where islanders, my mother included, sometimes had to forage the shore for limpets and seaweed, so severe were the food shortages.
The clatter of the microfiche spools also revealed how the island’s social life reawakened after liberation.
The cinema was back as the home of laughter, friendship, and dating.
My father, over from England on holiday in the 50s, met my mother at a liberation commemoration dance. My favourite photo shows them on an evening out, my mother’s hands still bare of rings, off to see a movie maybe.
‘Hollywood ending’
After my mother died in 2005, I took her last smart, black handbag to the Cannes Film Festival in tribute. And cinema, I decided, would inspire her final journey.
So on this trip to Jersey, I had brought my mother home.
Her ashes sat beside me in a maroon box as I sat there watching I Know Where I’m Going.
Back on the street afterwards, I was met by my closest friend from those first school days and we walked a familiar route past my old house, through the park, past her house and to the beach, where we had sat many times with our mothers and grandmothers.
I mixed my mother’s ashes with a crumbled, lavender-scented bath cube and scattered them in the sea at sundown with her favourite flowers, rose-coloured carnations, dahlias, gladioli and Jersey pinks.
I have this romantic idea that somewhere in the Channel she might meet my father, whose ashes we had scattered together off the south-east coast of England just a few years before.
I think they call that a Hollywood ending.
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