Why I Started Creating Legacy Films

In My Day Films was born from a deep core memory.

In grade four, my class and I were asked to interview a grandparent about one thing they cherished. Our teacher gave us examples like brooches, toys, or hairbrushes from their childhood, or perhaps from their own children's childhood. I knew exactly who I wanted to interview right away. My dad's mother. My grandma, who bought my favourite cereal whenever she knew I was coming to visit her and grandpa on the family farm. A selfless woman whose warmth outshone the sun as soon as your small hands finally wriggled the old porch door open into her kitchen. Her reverence for people and the land was instilled in me from a young age, and if she kept bits of string and endless buttons just in case of distant hard times, I could only imagine the things she kept that she truly cherished.

A Question, and a Few Days of Waiting

By this time I had heard that the matriarch of my family was a child in Poland when the Second World War set fire to the world she knew. This fuelled my curiosity. Could she have some relic from hundreds of years ago, passed down from generations of our family in the old country? I eagerly set out to find the answer. But what I learned was the furthest thing from what I expected, and it shaped who I would become for the rest of my life.

When I asked her over the phone, she asked for a couple of days to think about it. As I waited for what felt like ages back then, my parents reminded me to be patient. A few days later she called back, agreeing that the next time we saw each other, I could interview her.

I grabbed my Talkboy recorder, a fresh tape, and prepared my first studio in my childhood bedroom.

Setting the Scene

When the day finally arrived, nothing could have prepared me for what Grandma would reveal as her most cherished thing.

I can still picture every detail of my room: the colours cast by my lava lamp, my Lego in the corner, drawings hanging from the wall, my bunk bed with a navy sheet my mom had sewn to make it into a fort. My grandma was wearing a flowery pink blouse. The lines in her hands and face held an elegance that children learn to revere. Her smile shone brightly, as always, despite the nervousness she must have felt.

I hit the button that starts recording. Words that will stay with me forever, that I will pass down to my son and daughter, that they will pass down to theirs.

The Thing She Cherished Most

"What is the one thing you cherish most, Grandma?" I ask, expecting her to pull a golden, tarnished relic from her purse.

Grandma takes a deep breath in and slowly breathes out. She begins to tell me about her childhood.

About how her mother, father, and brother lived on a beautiful farm in the Polish countryside. About the orchard with fruit of every kind, the garden full of food, the fields of flowers, the chickens, pigs, and a few cows. Her family had been farming this land since immigrating a few hundred years prior from Germany. The land was fertile and so prosperous that they even had hired hands. A paradise on earth. She told me about loving the chickens and getting lost in a field of poppies. Memories that inspired her reverence for the world around her.

Then the War Came Marching

Her father successfully hid from the Nazi conscriptions for a time, but was eventually found hiding in the grain silo and sent to the eastern front. She told me her mom would catch fish, salt them, and add them into the care package she would send to the front. The family farm and all able bodies were also enlisted for the war effort, producing as much food as possible for the soldiers who came knocking regularly.

As the months and years ground on, she remembered smaller and smaller portions, less playing, and missing her father. She told me about the fierce resilience her mother exuded with every breath. A ferocity that kept her and her children together through unimaginable hardship.

When liberation finally came to Poland, any Germans remaining were forced to work as part of reparations for the war. The farm was now government property, and her family would work the land while watching their home dismantled, one fruit tree at a time burnt for warmth. She remembered the pigs eating better than she did. Through tears, a faith in Jesus that was instilled by candlelight every night, with a Bible tied across her mother's neck.

Ten Years, a War, and an Ocean

Throughout all this time, she had no idea that her father had survived the eastern front and years in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp. Upon his eventual release, he was sponsored by his brother to come to Canada, but not before leaving word with one of his old hired hands to find his family and tell them he was alive.

After ten years, a war, an Atlantic crossing, and traversing countless miles across two continents, at a small prairie railway station in Broadview, Saskatchewan, she was finally reunited with her father. She would go on to marry a farmer, raise three girls and three boys, and together with the love of her life build their own paradise on earth.

What She Cherished Most Was Freedom

I remember sitting there speechless, until Grandma finally said, "So what I cherish most is... freedom."

Not a thing or object. Not some tarnished relic. An idea that, thanks to her story, I could actually begin to grasp. An idea that was embedded into every ounce of my being and inspired me to become who I am today.

From My First Interview to My First Legacy Film

Grandma was my first interview. Decades later, she became my first legacy film interview. Seeing the impact her story has had, not just on my life but on our entire extended family, has shown me how important these stories are. Stories that have shaped who we are today, and that will continue to live on, inspiring future generations of our family thanks to Grandma's words captured forever in film.

It has been a gift I am proud to have given my family. In doing so, I realized that other families deserve this gift as well.

Why I Founded In My Day Films

Which is exactly why I founded In My Day Films: so that I could be of service to others who want to give this gift to their families as well.

Every remarkable life carries a story worth preserving. If there is someone in your family whose story you do not want to lose, begin the way I did all those years ago, with a question and a conversation.

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