CBC lifts the veil on an important part of the history of Black people in Montreal in its new large-scale series, and marks the history of Canadian television at the same time.
For the first time on the public broadcaster, a fiction series, written and directed almost exclusively by Afro-descendant Canadians, tells the story from the perspective of this marginalized community in a Canada of the 1920s where stigma and racism were more than ubiquitous.
Inspired by real events, The Porter follows a group of sleeping car porters, victims of discrimination and exploitation, in the creation of their first unions such as the Order of Sleeping Car Porters (OSCP) and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP ).
The eight-episode series was filmed in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and it was the Quebecois Réjean Labrie, scenographic designer, who had the mission to recreate the Montreal district of Little Burgundy, as well as the American cities of Detroit and Chicago.
The Manitoba capital was the most logical choice to shoot there The Porter, in particular because it still has a good number of century-old buildings, but above all because it has preserved a steam train with five cabin cars, the “Prairie dog train”, which is still functional. In addition, “we always say that Winnipeg is the Chicago of the North” and since part of the story takes place there, Winnipeg seemed like a shrewd choice as a filming location, said Réjean Labrie.
“It was still difficult to make Montreal in Winnipeg, but it was doable. There are small corners, with narrower streets and backyards that made it possible to recreate the alleys of Montreal,” said the man responsible for the sets in an interview with the QMI Agency.
The big challenge for his team was to “recreate Windsor Station, the big Chicago train station and the other small stations of the time” where the steam train passed, he said.
For the series, the set team, which included about forty carpenters and twenty painters, designed mainly train cabins, which were much more luxuriant at the time, interiors and a bar inspired by the Montreal bar Rockhead’s Paradise which was wildly popular in the 1930s and 1940s. Its founder, Rufus Rockhead, was also the first black owner of a club in Montreal.
“I didn’t have a lot of notions about how the black population had arrived in Quebec, where the trains came from. [et] as a francophone, we heard a lot more about white clubs,” admitted Réjean Labrie, adding that he had done a lot of research to recreate the reality of the time as faithfully as possible. The person in charge of the decorations was particularly interested in the great black figures of the time, among others the pianists Oscar Peterson, whose father was a bearer, and Oliver Jones.
In all, the creation of the sets took place from November 2020, until the end of filming in September 2021.
And it’s about 10% of the sets that were built in the studio. The rest is shared between exteriors and visual effects.
The Porter was created by actors Arnold Pinnock and Bruce Ramsay, written in collaboration with screenwriters Annmarie Morais, Marsha Greene (Mary Kills people with Caroline Dhavernas), Andrew Burrows-Trotman, Priscilla White and directed by Charles Officer and RT Thorne.
The Porter airs on CBC Mondays starting February 21 at 9 p.m. and will be available for streaming on CBC Gem, also accessible via ICI TOU.TV.
The eight episodes produced by Sienna Films and Inferno Pictures will flow at the rate of one per week.