Filming in Jersey WW2 © Ghosts Of AlderneyArtist Piers Secunda unveiled the hidden history of Alderney in a new documentary released by Wild Dog productions and screened this month at The Poly, Falmouth, bringing a new light to the atrocious acts committed by Nazis on British soil during World War 2.
In this gritty feature-length film, the brilliant minds of a small team give voice to those unheard during the Nazi reign there.
From emotional tell-all stories to the uncovering of never-seen-before documents in family homes, a number of secrets buried in this history of the small island of Alderney were uncovered by director Andrew Johnstone and artist Piers Secunda.
Across a 5-year journey tracing stories of the horrors committed again slave labourers on the island in the English channel, Secunda inventively memorialises innocents who were starved, beaten and shot.
Vanished reports and memorials without truth were extensively magnified, bringing light to those forgotten amongst the atrocious acts.
Secunda tells the forgotten and silenced stories of victims shipped to the Channel Islands to become slave workers to build Hitler’s ‘Fortress’ In Alderney, where treatment was the harshest and prisoners were shot for prizes during games played by the guards.
He tells viewers: “The academic research deals with lists of names and adding numbers to create a total figure of number of people who came to Alderney. But people aren’t numbers. They’re human beings. They have lives, they have histories, backgrounds. Qnd that’s the story that I want to tell.”
Filming at Alderney © Ghosts Of Alderney
Following the screening at The Poly, Falmouth, director Andrew Johnstone and journalism lecturer Andy Chatfield opened up a Q&A for the audience.
Johnstone described the narrative as “set-a-hare running” story. Johnstone and his team knew this story needed to be unveiled.
He paid tribute to Piers Secunda, whose painstaking research over five years provides the basis for the film. “We owe an awful lot to him,” Johnstone told the audience.