May 1984: At a dinner party in Toronto, Patricia Gruben meets an Inuit from Tuktoyaktuk, n.w.t., who tells her he was married to a woman with her name. Gruben is intrigued, not only by the idea that she might have distant relatives in the Arctic, but also by the notion that such a fact would be important to a person: that the idea of ‘family’ could stretch so far.

February 1985: Traveling in Germany as a guest of the German Film Sekretariat, Gruben borrows a camera from ZDF and shoots some test footage for a film about how the myths we learn from our families and the culture we come from give us a sense of who we are as individuals.

She will use her own family history as a model for the kind of fictions we all invent and elaborate over the course of our lives. This means traveling to her father’s now nearly-deserted home town of Spur, Texas and to Germany to trace the roots not of the Gruben family per se, but of the German culture that still influences the family after four generations; and the myths of Nazi Germany that drew on and reinvented that culture.

The film will finally take her to Tuktoyaktuk to track down the other Grubens; to see what happens when strangers are confronted with the idea of a family relationship. Gruben applies for and receives a $40,000 grant from the Canada Council to make an 80-minute film.

July 1986: With a crew of three, Gruben drives to Texas and begins shooting in Austin, San Antonio and Spur, moving on to New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming during the next four weeks. There is a rough ‘script’, but much of the imagery for the film is coming together during the trip itself.

Gruben makes a rough assembly of the footage and goes back to the Canada Council for $35,000 in finishing money, then returns to her day job teaching film at Simon Fraser University in B.C. and running the Praxis Film Development Workshop.

July 1987: With the additional funding, Gruben and a small crew fly to Germany and spend three weeks shooting around Cologne, Munich and points south.

At this point, much footage has been shot but the structure of the film is still in question. One problem is how to deliver a lot of information (for instance how to define the film’s central metaphor, ley lines themselves) without being overly didactic. Before solving the problem, Gruben gets caught up in another project, a 35mm feature called Deep Sleep, which she writes and directs in the fall of 1989.

Fall 1991: Gruben is invited to a conference in Montreal sponsored by the Goethe-Institut and decides to show the German reel of Ley Lines in the hope that a discussion with an audience will help break the creative impasse of the sound track.

Preparing the section, she hits on the idea of having a number of unseen characters who will interact with each other in voice-over. In the process, she realizes the film is more than an intellectual abstraction; it is also an investigation of the tragedy of her father’s life.

At last it’s possible to shoot the final section of the film in Tuktoyaktuk. She applies for and is granted another $20,000, this time from the B.C. Cultural Services Branch.

May 1992: Gruben and crew spend two weeks in Tuktoyaktuk tracking down the adventurous patriarch who migrated from Switzerland in 1907 and stayed to sire 10 children. Was he related? There’s no proof. But the important thing is that sharing an unusual name leads to a sense of community with a group of willing strangers.

Ley Lines now has a structure which has grown out of the experiences of the past seven years. With sound designer Martin Gotfrit, Gruben spends the next year putting the film together.

September 1993: Ley Lines is finished just in time to premier at the 1993 Festival of Festivals in Toronto.