When I arrived on the Channel Island of Guernsey on Thursday, I was an hour late and conscious that the man who would pick me up from the airport had to wait for me.
“Don’t worry, this happens all the time. The weather can be rather unpredictable out here,” Brandon Ashplant reassured me. He had kindly agreed to meet me at the airport in person. He is the director of Whispers of Freedom, a short film about Chris Gueffroy, the last person to be shot dead at the Berlin Wall, and I’d come to attend the Guernsey premiere.
If Guernsey seems a strange place to talk about the victims of the Berlin Wall, I agree. When Brandon first told me that parts of the film would be shot on the island, I was surprised and confused. But, as he explained over dinner, he is a local man with a keen interest in promoting the island’s burgeoning film industry.
Using local actors, costume designers and editors, the film ended up being a real community effort. When I was interviewed on Friday by a reporter for the Guernsey Press (the island’s only daily paper), he casually mentioned that he had an acting role in the film. Later, I learn that many other islanders with ordinary day jobs (among them a pilot, a finance advisor and an interior designer) were either in the film as actors or had helped make it. It was just one indication of how small and tight-knit the island’s community of just 65,000 people is.
This closeness is felt in many ways. It seemed to me during my brief visit that Guernsey is home to people who not only often know each other but who also broadly share a fairly coherent collective sense of identity — an identity that seems in no small part built on what happened to the island during the German occupation and on liberation from the Nazi yoke.
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