"I Just Didn't Want to Die" : The 1914 Newfoundland Sealing Disaster

For 200 years, coal mining had been a way of life--and death--in Cape Breton. By 1920 things were looking up: miners were unionized and paid decent wages. Then the British Empire Steel Corporation arrived and bought every single steel and coal company in Nova Scotia. BESCO also owned stores, houses and land. Then the company cut wages by a third--setting off a bitter labour dispute. The miners tightened their belts and settled in for a long strike. Company stores were looted and burned, and finally in 1925 the military ended the unrest with brute force. But the miners, in an important sense, had won. They broke up the monopoly and provided an example to workers across the country.

Richly woven of fine threads that mingle and separate, surface and disappear, this poetic documentary studies the works of one of Canada's greatest contemporary etchers: Newfoundland-born David Blackwood. The artist himself guides the viewer through a step-by-step explanation of the entire etching process. Scenes of his hometown outport, examples of his masterfully crafted prints, and the vivid tales of an old mariner recall the tragic seal hunts and a way of life that has now vanished.

54 Hours is a remarkably vivid account of the 1914 tragedy in which 132 men were stranded on the ice during a severe snowstorm off the coast of Newfoundland. Seventy-eight men froze to death on the ice pack. The last of the wooden steamers in an industry already dominated by steel ships, the Newfoundland couldn't break ice like the newer ships, and had no radio equipment. Still, men came from across the province to work on the ship; some came for the money, some for the adventure. They slept on the skins of seals they had killed, their clothes caked in blood and grease. That spring in 1914, with the ship unable to reach a seal pack, 132 men were ordered off the boat and onto the ice, to hunt. They spent two unbearable nights on the ice. Survivor testimony, striking archival materials, weather visualizations, inventive animation and puppetry are seamlessly blended to recreate this harrowing ordeal.