Elijah Allan-Blitz directed a short virtual reality piece on Martha Sharp's journey from Portugal to New York City with the children she rescued. The VR film is available on Time’s Life VR app.
You’ve been a long time friend of Artemis Joukowsky, co-director of Defying the Nazis with Ken Burns. Can you explain how the virtual reality short film came about?
Allan-Blitz: Artemis is one of those people that’s my soul brother and I have always wanted to work with him in some capacity. I had already been directing VR and shot several pieces when we began talking about eight months ago. We talked about how amazing it would be to actually immerse the audience in Martha and Waitstill’s story and to bring them to their historical moment and allow the audience to live through it themselves. We talked about several scenes from the PBS film that we could use as a basis for the VR piece, and the one that really jumped out at us was the children’s rescue and their experience on the boat from Portugal to New York.
If I put on the virtual reality goggles for this piece, what would I see?
The VR film begins with Martha reading a letter as you set out on a boat across the Atlantic. You are in the middle of the ocean and up above are thousands of stars, and photos of the children begin appearing in the starry sky, and you hear each of their stories. Then you arrive in New York, you see Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, and the sun rising over the city’s skyline. The CGI team at VR Playhouse went to such great lengths to make the experience as historically accurate as possible that they got the blueprints for the boat, the Excambion, that Martha and the children were on. It’s an exact replica down to the millimeter. It’s as close to the real thing as you can get. We created a little time machine.
What potential does VR have for allowing us to experience the past?
The potential of this technology is pretty much limitless. I’m interested in using VR to educate, to raise awareness, to use this incredibly powerful technology as a force for good. You can take someone into a refugee camp in Syria right now in real time and live stream it, or like we’ve done, you can take someone back to a boat in 1940 that saved these Jewish children from going to concentration camps.
You showed Amelie Holmstrom, one of the children Martha saved who was on the boat on the boat, the VR piece. What was that like?
We showed a rough cut of the VR experience to Amelie, so there was a holocaust survivor watching a recreation of her rescue in virtual reality and her reaction is amazing. Her son also watched it, and when he took of the goggles there were tears streaming out of his eyes. He looked at us and said, “I’ve heard about this boat ride my entire life and now I can finally see it.”
In that moment we knew that all the time and effort we put into the piece was worth it.
To watch the full experience and explore more exclusive virtual reality content download the LIFE VR app for iOS and Android or visit time.com/lifevr.
