Back Lane Studios

We’re embarking on an ambitious new project at Back Lane called Mapping our Memories, and we would love you to join us. Our plan: Collect seniors’ memories and link them to digital maps. This Mapping our Memories project was inspired by our friend Lois Broad, 95, and her stories about Growing up in the Junction.   More details here. This program was supported in part by the Government of Canada’s New Horizons for Seniors Program.

Join us on Sunday, April 28 at 12:00 pm for a screening of the 2016 bio-pic Maudie about the Nova Scotia folk-artist Maud Lewis. For our post-film discussion, we welcome local resident Mary Young Leckie, who was the creative producer behind the film. She learned about Maud more than 20 years ago, when she was working on a film about the 1917 Halifax explosion. It took 13 years to complete the movie, but what a team was behind it: Irish director Aisling Walsh, big-name actors Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke, and funding from Canada and Ireland.

At the screening, we will also meet two of Maud’s descendants, a great granddaughter and great, great granddaughter! Maud’s only child, born out of wedlock, was fostered by another family. We will learn how her descendants learned about Maud and their parentage, and the impact that has had on their lives.

Tickets are available in advance on Eventbrite for a suggested $15 donation. Click here. 

Watch the trailer here.

Read more about the event here: Extraordinary Women: The Folk Artist – April 28, 12:00 pm

Mark Sunday, May 26, 2:00 pm on your calendar for another event at our studio. You’ll meet Lillian Jackman, a former club dancer and, with her husband, an owner of nightclubs in New York, Montreal, Quebec and Toronto. She has many, many stories to tell.

We will be streaming the NFB film Show Girls, a wonderful little documentary about three women who sang and danced in the Montreal clubs back in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. Lillian grew up in Little Burgundy, Montreal’s Black community, where she was friends with the children of one of the women featured in the film, and took tap dancing at a school run by another of them.

Lillian joined us, as a member of our panel, for our screening of the Anthony Sherwood’s documentary Music — A Family Tradition at the Revue.

If you are interested in attending this event, please email us at ellen@backlanestudios.ca. There are only a few of the limited seats still available.

Welcome to OldTO. It’s an interactive map featuring a wealth of digitized historic photos from the City of Toronto Archives.

Are you interested in what your neighbourhood might have looked like? Do you want to revisit downtown before all of the condos went up? Have a look at the map and see. There are thousands of images, some dating back to 1856.

The map was originally created by Sidewalk Labs, the Google affiliate that was planning a downtown development in Toronto’s Portlands. Sidewalk abandoned its project in 2020 and eventually stopped hosting OldTO. However, they kindly left the source code freely available.

At Back Lane Studios, we were sad to see OldTO vanish. One of our main projects is our Mapping our Memories endeavour. This photo map parallels this interest, and we are thrilled to be able to restore it.

We will be forever grateful to software developer Michael Lenaghan for his terrific work bringing this mapping tool back to life! (Check the browser you use to access oldto.org. Try Chrome if you’re having problems.)

Thank you, Eva Stachniak, for your presentation on April 21 about remarkable dancer and choreographer Bronislava Nijinska. She was devoted to but overshadowed by her superstar brother, Vaslav Nijinsky, whose career was cut short by mental illness. Carrying responsibilities for children, facing turbulence of war and revolution, she managed to engineer her escape from Soviet authorities and made a life for herself in the United States, teaching and continuing her innovative choreography.

Eva, who lives in our High Park neighbourhood, shone a spotlight on Nijinska in The Chosen Maiden, a carefully researched fictionalized biography that brings the dancer/choreographer’s complex story to life.

This Back Lane Studios’ book, compiled during Covid lockdowns, is a collection of recipes and stories about seniors’ favourite childhood foods illustrated with wonderful family photos. We are grateful to everyone who contributed. Not only does it offer some classic comfort food dishes, but it also offers some fascinating glimpses of history. It would make a great gift! To order, please email us: info@backlanestudios.ca. The book is $20, plus $8 to mail if we can’t deliver in person!  Meanwhile, read several food stories here, and watch some video versions!

Our next Film Club screening on Sunday, May 5, 2:00 pm at the studio is Burnt by the Sun, from Russian Director Nikita Mikhalkov. This gloriously-shot Russian drama (English subtitles) takes place over one day in the late 1930s at a country dacha. The main character, Sergei Kotov, realizes that his status as a revolutionary hero will not save him from Stalin’s purges.  Club member and organizer Kirsten Gunter selected this film and will provide a short introduction. For more information about the film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnt_by_the_Sun

Are you interested in the club? Send an email to KirstenBackLaneStudios@outlook.com. There may be spaces available. Click here for more information about the club.