Canadian women who played their part in the Second World War are to get some recognition courtesy of Lori Kuffner’s Canadian Women of Courage.

The four-part, one-hour doc series, already preceded by a standalone pilot, consists of an episode covering the efforts of nursing sisters in the war, one concerning the girls in the Army show, and two episodes detailing the experiences of two individuals, Gladys Arnold and Joan Bamford Fletcher.

Arnold, a Canadian reporter living in France, was the only Canadian press person to witness the fall of France, and Fletcher led defeated Japanese soldiers in freeing interned Dutch in Sumatra after the end of the war in the Pacific.

Kuffner, writer, director and producer of the series, recently returned from a research trip abroad that included stops in England, the Channel Islands, France and Holland to speak to participants in and observers of the four wartime experiences chronicled.

For such a long-ago set of stories, numerous original sources still remain. Research uncovered two ex-Army dancers in Vancouver, who have been friends since meeting in the ’40s in the line of duty, and Robert Fornon, a famous musical arranger from the Army show who was present in the show’s early days before it was split into several traveling companies. The Amsterdam trip yielded a survivor from the Sumatran camp, who remembered Fletcher and the liberation and had written a book about it.

‘The dancing girls remember liberation,’ says Kuffner. ‘They talk about the devastation of Holland in World War Two. They saw Belsen about nine days after its liberation; one of the dancers talked about the stench.’

The series was indirectly inspired off the back of another Kuffner documentary, that one on the subject of the All-American Girls Baseball League (10% of the league was Canadian), which sparked her interest in the war’s effect on women.

‘What I gather is that war gave them the opportunity to achieve goals they wouldn’t have reached otherwise,’ she says. ‘That’s something that I’d never thought about before because we don’t take that in history in schools – it was like finding this little gold mine. It was quite inspiring for me to tell the stories of Canadian women and what they had accomplished during a significant time of our history. And if we don’t tell this story now we won’t at all. It needs to be told.’

The project has been underway since 1997. Presales financed the pilot episode, A Time For Courage, about the aviator Violet Milstead Warren, which serves as a taster for the four episodes now underway. Shot last summer, A Time For Courage is set for a Nov. 11 air date on History Television.

The four episodes and the pilot are funded by various combinations of sources, including presales, the Millennium Partnership Program, Knowledge Network, scn, cky-tv, the Canadian Heritage Department of Canadian Studies, the Royal Canadian Legion, Future Skills, cbc (Saskatchewan and Halifax), the ctf, Telefilm Canada and provincial and federal tax credits.

The four episodes – ‘Nurses on the Field,’ ‘Dancing In Wartime,’ ‘Eyewitness To The Fall’ and ‘Too Tough’ – were shot over the summer from the beginning of June to the end of August, with post taking place this fall. Two episodes are scheduled for completion Dec. 15, with the remaining two ready for delivery April 30, 2001.

Partners in Motion is distributing the pilot.

*Patience pays off

When Mentors wrapped at the end of September it was finishing its second full season – after four years.

The pilot, shot in 1997 (triggered by cfrn in Edmonton, which had a mandate to fund pilots) was followed by a limited order for five additional episodes the next year, also from cfrn. In 1999, between orders from wic and ctv, seven more Mentors were shot, making up a full slate of 13 episodes.

This year marks the first time a complete season of Mentors has been shot all together, made possible by interest from Family Channel, which asked for an additional season. Family has also agreed to develop 13 more episodes, which series producers Margaret Mardirossian and Josh Miller plan to start working on imminently, with a summer shoot planned for next year.

Mentors, a coprod between Edmonton’s Anaid Productions and Regina’s Minds Eye Pictures, is sold in 74 countries. The next goal for the producers is to successfully market the series to the u.s.