A short musical film about a tragic event in Peterborough’s history is now available for online viewing.
One Day in December premiered in May at the ‘Erring at King George’ multidisciplinary arts festival, presented by Public Energy Performing Arts at the decommissioned King George Public School in Peterborough’s East City.
Written and directed by filmmaker LA Alfonso with lyrics by Rob Fortin and music by Susan Newman, One Day in December imagines the experience of a teacher and students who witnessed the 1916 explosion and fire at the Quaker Oats plant in Peterborough from their classroom at King George Public School.
With the First World War raging in Europe, workers at the Quaker Oats plant had been working around the clock meeting wartime contacts. That heightened activity overwhelmed the plant’s system for controlling the grain dust so, when a small fire broke out in a grinding room, it ignited the cloud of dust at 10:20 a.m. on Monday, December 11, 1916.
The resulting massive explosion levelled the plant, killing 22 workers — two more would later die as a result of their injuries — and resulting in over $2 million in damages. The fire at the plant burned for four days. At King George Public School, then only three years old, students whose classroom windows faced the plant witnessed the event and its aftermath.
“We decided we would try to present that morning from the point of view of a fictional teacher in the classroom and the students, who would have been in the middle of doing whatever you do on a normal school day,” Newman told kawarthaNOW in April. “We called it One Day In December because it was just an ordinary day until ‘BOOM.’ It’s a look at an everyday occurrence with just everyday people and the impact that something like that can have.”
VIDEO: “One Day In December”
The film features Marsala Lukianchuk as the teacher along with a cast of young performers as the students. Not seen on film but heard is a choir from Kaawaate East City Public School.
Newman and Fortin wrote five original songs for One Day In December: “My Brood,” “The Coldest One,” “Is This The War?”, “A Prayer for Safety,” and “A Child’s Alphabet in Wartime.” Their original plan had been to present their piece as a live performance in a classroom during Erring at King George. When that became impossible to do because of pandemic restrictions at the time, it evolved into a film project at the suggestion of Alfonso.
For the film’s debut at Erring at King George, Alfonso created a unique video projection-mapping presentation that transformed the classroom windows in Room 12 into “portals of an imagined past.”
The 20-minute film, which also features rarely seen photographs of the devastation caused by the explosion and fire at the Quaker Oats plant, was shot on location at King George Public School.
“We made the classroom look like it did in 1916,” Fortin told kawarthaNOW.. “How often do you get the chance to tell a story and recreate it in the very place that it happened? It was like ‘Wow.’ You really felt the ghosts.”
Fortin also appears in the film as a former worker at the Quaker Oats plant who takes his granddaughter to the empty school many years later, reminiscing both about the tragedy and the First World War.
For more information, visit www.lesteralfonso.com/one-day-in-december-2022/.
