For Saskatchewan filmmaker Scott Woroniuk, setting out to document a historic plane wreck in the province’s muskeg region was his most ambitious project yet.
While Woroniuk has worked on several films before, he says nothing compares to his experience of going directly to the site of Saskatchewan’s wetlands in pursuit of retelling a 77-year-old tale of a downed plane.
“It’s waist-deep, it’s cold, it’s miserable, it’s sticky,” Woroniuk said. “It’s not a fun place trying to walk around.”
Woroniuk’s documentary tells the story of a September 1948 U.S Navy flight that was en route to Manitoba’s The Pas from Churchill when it went missing.
The ensuing large-scale search and rescue operation led by The Royal Canadian Air Force with assistance from the American military was called Operation Attaché and lasted almost two weeks.
Among the five men on board, two were senior naval officers from the British and American embassies in Ottawa, which explains why the search effort was the largest in the country at the time, said David Riach, an aviation writer whose research and writing of the crash inspired Woroniuk’s documentary.
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“It was a huge story at the time, but over the years it gradually kind of just faded away,” said Riach.
When Woroniuk caught wind of the flight’s story, and its relatively unknown nature, he said he was “enthralled” and had to look deeper into it. So, he decided to take to Google Earth and try to search for the wreckage himself.
“And all of a sudden, ‘Holy lightning that looks like it,’” he said, recounting the story of when he came across the wreckage.
Though the wreckage site is well-known among local First Nations and pilots who fly over the area, the 14-minute film is the first of its kind to document and link the crash site to the rescue operation, says Woroniuk.
“It’s not like I discovered it, you know. Much like how Christopher Columbus didn’t discover North America,” he said, adding that he connected with locals who were able to confirm the site was indeed from 1948.
The documentary is also park of Woroniuk’s self-funded “Abandoned Saskatchewan” series that aims to highlight forgotten and unknown stories from across the province, which Woroniuk says was inspired by his dad’s encyclopedia of knowledge on the province.
“When people think of Canadian history, they tend to think of everything big happened down east, the Confederation and the Charlottetown Accord,” he said. “But Saskatchewan has a lot of really interesting history and a lot really cool stories to tell.”
Lost in the Muskeg: The Plane Canada Forgot will premiere this Friday on Crosscut Film’s YouTube channel.
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