Stratford can’t get enough of grassroots documentary We Lend A Hand

The Q-and-A panel of (from left) Filipe Giaj-Levra, Colin Field and Bonnie Sitter was moderated by Bill Harris, general manager of SFF.

After two sold-out screenings with Stratford Film Festival (SFF), and a successful run at the Stratford Cinema, the community came out and packed the barn for the screening of We Lend A Hand, The Forgotten Story of Ontario Farmerettes.

On Sept. 13 at Ritsma’s Barn, producer/director Colin Field greeted guests eager to see the documentary so many people have been talking about. There were 40,000 Ontario Farmerettes who volunteered during the war to work on the farms while the men who typically would labour were away fighting for the country.

The audience was enthralled, and while the cause for these young girls to have left their home and family was serious, there was a great deal of humour found by the audience in the telling of their stories, which was touching to Bill Harris, general manager of SFF and co-sponsor of the evening.

“It has a lot of dimensions to it, it has stories and history, I’ve seen it at least a dozen times but I’ve seen it only three times with an audience and it’s really funny, I kind of forgot that, and the girls were wild, they were out there on their own doing things and it really brought a lot of heart to the story,” said Harris.

In fact, there was an audience member who knew that his mother worked on a farm during the war, but didn’t know she was a Farmerette until that night, after seeing her signature on a slide shown.

The film covers the time from the call to service to leaving friends and family behind to the arduous work on the farms, which proved to be the best summers of their lives. Twenty Farmerettes, who are now in their 90s, were interviewed and shared photos and stories with Field and Bonnie Sitter, historical producer and co-author of the book Onion Skins and Peach Fuzz, Memories of Ontario Farmerettes, written with Shirleyan English.

The Q-and-A that followed the film featured Field, Sitter and executive producer Filipe Giaj-Levra exploring the making of the film. Field is a newer filmmaker who went back to school to study filmmaking. He met Sitter at the Goderich fair and within no time, they were into all things Farmerette.

“I was invited to Goderich festival, where, by chance, I met Bonnie, and it takes about thirty seconds after you meet Bonnie to start speaking about the Farmerettes, and so we started talking,” said Field. “Fast forward to the pandemic, and I had finished my (film) program... Bonnie showed me the book, and that’s how it all started. I thought, ‘Why hasn’t this been made into a film?’”

They wanted to capture the story of how the Farmerettes helped win the Second World War by volunteering to aid farmers with food production. Inspired by the research Sitter had done and the desire to bring the forgotten Canadian story to life, the two came together to fundraise and produce the film.

“It has been a privilege to travel through the province and hear the stories of these surviving Farmerettes,” Field said. “If it wasn’t for these girls, the soldiers wouldn’t have had food to eat and the economy would have ground to a halt.”

As a grassroots film, it has been travelling throughout southwestern Ontario and has had about 30 screenings to date, with about 40 more planned this fall. Saturday’s screening was generously sponsored by Mayor Martin Ritsma and family, Armor Pro Audio Visual, Stratford Film Festival, Stratford Perth Museum and Central Sanitation.

To learn more, visit welendahand.ca