Phase 3- Shooting the Film
With all our locations in Germany, Guernsey and Jersey planned we set out to find the ideal crew to work with us in shaping the vision of Toni’s War as we then saw it. We settled on Anne Misslewitz and Christian Johnsen, both recent graduates of the London College Of Printing film degree. Anne had a visual style that was very distinctive and photographic in look. She had worked with Christian a number of times during their course and so we deemed them to be an ideal foil for each other.
The Germany shoot to film veterans who served throughout the Occupation of the islands was to be a hectic one: in the space of 6 days we covered over 2000km visiting in order: Eschwege, Beverungen, Hannover, Brelingen, Koln, Bonn, Buisdorf and St Augustin, Haiger, Butzbach, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and finally Munich.
There we conducted interviews with eleven ex-servicemen ranging from privates to captains and a number of civilians from Buisdorf who had known the Kumpel family. The hospitality and well-being demonstrated by everyone we encountered was second to none as we found ourselves stuffed to overflowing with food and entertained with stories of local customs and history.
The shoot then moved on to the Channel Islands themselves. An eventful and frantic journey to Jersey ended only a hundred metres from the beach and some beautiful sunshine. We realised then that the shoot was about to enter a totally different phase, one where frantic travelling and long distances could be replaced with a more laid back and calm style of film-making. We shot for a week in Jersey, visiting their incredible restored German Underground Hospital Museum, a number of other restored German fortifications and interviewing islanders who had a number of incredible stories, the highlight being Bob Le Soeur’s stories about helping Russian slave workers escape the forced labour camps on the isdland.
Guernsey for ten days proved to be a very similar experience and in the 17 days we spent in the islands only a couple were marred by bad weather. Interviews with various local Occupation survivors were mixed with days filming the beautiful island scenery, the imposing German fortifications that formed part of the Atlantic Wall and occasionally the odd bit of running about in lanes. It was a fun, relaxed time whilst still being tightly structured and time-consuming. The only down side to the shoot was ending on three days of non-stop archive filming with letters, diaries, photos and newpapers all passing the lens in a blur of paper. Such was the volume of material available to us regarding the Occupation of the Islands, we could have spent weeks filming and still not captured it all!
All in all over 28hrs worth of footage was shot covering 42 tapes. With this in tow we headed back to the mainland for the final phase, editing the film.
