Canadian film producer and music composer Danny Schur, who was perhaps best known for adapting his 2005 stage musical Strike! into the 2019 movie musical Stand!, has died.

The Ethelbert, Man.-born Schur died in Winnipeg on April 10 at age 56 following a brain cancer diagnosis, according to his sister, Carolyn Schur.

Schur served as coproducer, co-writer, music composer and lyricist for Stand!, which builds on the theatrical production. It’s set against the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike that began on May 15 that year and claimed the life of a Ukrainian immigrant, Mike Sokolowski, and injured some 30 others when the strike reached a boiling point on June 21 in what became known as “Bloody Saturday.”

Schur, who was deeply connected to his hometown roots and Ukrainian heritage, also made the documentary Mike’s Bloody Saturday about the events surrounding Sokolowski’s death.

But unlike Strike!‘s focus on Ukrainians caught up in the massive labour disruption, Schur and Winnipeg screenwriter Rick Chafe — who collaborated on Strike! — broadened the plotline in Stand! to introduce new characters who come together from different backgrounds to fight for their rights. The wider story was the idea of Robert Adetuyi, a Sudbury, Ont.-born filmmaker and screenwriter in Hollywood whom Schur tapped to direct the movie musical.

“In our first conversation, he said to me that it was a very white story,” recalled Schur in a 2019 interview. “He himself is a man of colour and has a very interesting immigrant story. His dad was from Nigeria and was the first Black man to settle in Sudbury in the mid-1940s and fell in love with a German-born woman.”

Changes were made and Emma the Irish maid in Strike! became a Black character in Stand!

Schur explained that the character switch was based as much on history as it was in expanding the racial content, harkening back to a migration of Black Oklahoman farmers who came to Canada between 1907 and 1919, and settled in such cities as Winnipeg.

Bringing the story to the screen was not, however, Schur’s idea initially.

On the second-last night of the musical’s first run in 2005, while seated beside American actor Jeff Goldblum — who was dating the female lead, Winnipeg-born Catherine Wreford at the time — Schur recalled Goldblum telling him: “Big story. Big ideas. It would make a great movie.”

It took Schur five years to secure $7 million — about one-third of which came from Winnipeg’s Ukrainian Canadian community — to finance the film, which was shot in Winnipeg in 2018.

He was also able to convince Cineplex to open Stand! in 30 Canadian cities on Nov. 29, 2019 – an “unparalleled” and “unprecedented” achievement for a Canadian independent movie without either a studio’s backing or a distributor’s involvement, according to Schur.

A lifelong hockey fan and a goalie on men’s teams throughout Winnipeg, Schur paid a cinematic tribute to another Winnipegger and Ukrainian Canadian, Terry Sawchuk. The Hockey News, in 1997, ranked Sawchuk No. 9 – the highest for a goaltender – on its list of the Top 100 NHL Players of All-Time.

Schur directed and wrote the 2015 docudrama Made in Winnipeg: The Terry Sawchuk Origin Story, which starred Winnipeg-born Markian Tarasiuk, a 2021 Canadian Screen Award nominee for Best Lead Performance in a TV Movie (Christmas Jars, 2019).

Prior to his death, Schur was developing a feature film about the First World War internment of Ukrainian Canadians called Spirit Lake, the name of a camp in northwestern Quebec where 1,200 men, woman and children – mainly of Ukrainian descent – were confined as “enemy aliens.”

Schur, who co-wrote the script with Chafe and composed the music, developed a proof of concept in 2021 for the movie. It was to feature Tarasiuk in one of the lead roles, but it was never made.

Photo from Schur’s Facebook page, used with permission from Carolyn Schur