Films on Burd Sisler, Indigenous burial sites to screen free in Fort Erie

TIFF in Fort Erie will screen two films about the town’s history on November 12: a docudrama on Burdett Sisler, who lived to 110, and a documentary on Indigenous burial sites beneath Fort Erie.

The screenings start at 7 p.m. in the Meridian Centre for the Arts auditorium at Greater Fort Erie Secondary School on Garrison Road. Admission is free, but TIFF in Fort Erie requires guests to register in advance.

TIFF will accept non-perishable food and cash donations at the screening for the Fort Erie Native Friendship Centre’s food pantry.

Sisler, a Second World War veteran who worked about 30 years as a customs officer at the Peace Bridge, was Canada’s oldest living person when he died April 2, weeks before his 111th birthday.

Stoney Creek filmmaker Abraam Dawod finished the 30-minute film, titled ‘Burd,’ shortly before Sisler died. Dawod interviewed Sisler at Garrison Place retirement home, where Sisler recalled details as small as the soup his father made in the 1920s.

Sisler’s great-grandsons, Zachary and Nathan Donald, played Sisler and his brother Louis as boys in the film’s reenactments. Great-granddaughter Grace Koscak played Sisler’s late wife, Mae, as a teenager.

“What I was really interested in is what are the deeper personal memories that a filmmaker can capture that become lost in history once that person passes,” Dawod told Fort Erie Radio in April.

Producer Mitch Baird and director Michael Summers, both Indigenous community members, started ‘Echoes of the Ancestors’ about two years ago after construction crews found Indigenous artifacts at the site of a wastewater pumping station near the Niagara River.

Archaeologists digging under a Peace Bridge truck yard in the 1990s recovered flint arrowheads, knives, pottery and stone fishing-net weights among hundreds of thousands of artifacts, some dating back about 9,000 years.

A burial site investigation order has blocked a planned housing development at 237 and 253 Niagara Parkway since November 2024, after crews found human remains in soil trucked onto the property.

“How do you build a town on top of another town that’s almost 10,000 years old?” Baird told Fort Erie Radio last month.

‘Echoes of the Ancestors’ premiered in three parts on Bell Fibe TV1 on September 10. Baird said at the time he was planning a local screening with the Town of Fort Erie and the Friendship Centre.

The creators of each film will answer audience questions for 20 minutes after their screening.

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