“Emotional Train Wreck”: Filming of Swissair Flight 111 Comes Close to Home
Kris Holden-Ried, dressed in a dark peacoat and bright red scarf, stands in a sunny patch at the edge of Griffin Pond in Halifax Public Gardens, with the early morning light illuminating him as he looks across the water. .
The Canadian-born actor isn’t looking at lush trees and urban waterfowl — he’s making a movie in which he plays Saul, a grieving father from Westchester, N.Y., who recently arrived in Halifax to identify remains of his son killed. in the crash of Swissair Flight 111.
Scheduled to premiere next year, the film “111” is a joint Canadian-Swiss production that follows the intertwined stories of four people following the September 2, 1998 Swissair crash near Peggy’s Cove, in Nova Scotia. The MD-11 jet plunged into the Atlantic Ocean about 70 minutes into a routine flight from New York to Geneva after a fire broke out in the ceiling and caused several system failures. All 229 people on board were killed.
Director Mauro Mueller said the film focuses on people, not the accident itself, but the hope that emerges from grief.
“(The accident) is very present in the consciousness of all the Swiss, but also of the Canadian (people), declared Mueller in an interview with The Canadian Press during the team’s last day of filming in New York. Scotland. “We know what happened. It made no sense to dramatize the accident itself and the tragedy.”
In addition to Saul, the drama follows two Swiss characters: one who loses his mother and a Swiss airline employee who travels to Halifax after the accident as part of a care team. The film also follows some of the Nova Scotia fishermen who were the first to take to the water in search of survivors.
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Nova Scotia was particularly shaken by the accident. Several fishermen rushed to Peggy’s Cove — a famous tourist spot southwest of Halifax — as soon as they heard the thunderous sound of the plane hitting the ocean, only to return to the horrors of the scene.
Holden-Ried, who also appeared in the TV series “The Umbrella Academy,” said filming in Nova Scotia added to the weight of an already emotional project. Many of the locals he spoke with while filming at Peggy’s Cove had a personal story about the tragedy. Hearing these stories, he said, contributed to a sense of “tremendous responsibility” to get the film right.
“It’s an important part of their lives and you can feel the emotionality of the locals as they tell their stories,” he said. “There’s enough distance and it’s still a very important part of (people’s) lives and it shows, but they’re very supportive of us. They are happy that we are filming it here.
Location wasn’t the only thing that directly linked the cast and crew to the tragedy. Björn Hering, Swiss producer of the film, is the son-in-law of one of the pilots on the final journey of Swissair Flight 111.
Holden-Ried said those close family ties made filming an “emotional disaster.”
“We all cry every day,” he said.
As a form of respite from the film’s heavy scenes, the script incorporates what the team called “magic moments”, or short points in the film designed to give the audience some breathing room. Inspired by the magical realism often found in Latin American literature and cinema, Mueller said these moments are designed to “externalize the feelings of each character in a key moment of the film and visualize that moment in a cinematic way.”
Other Nova Scotia locations featured in the film include the Halifax Airport, Hatchet Lake and Terence Bay. The rest of the production will be filmed in Switzerland.
© 2024 The Canadian Press
