Remembering a Memory: Rudin on Grosse-Ile

Recently Ronald Rudin, the Concordia University historian, produced a documentary short film on Grosse Ile, the quarantine island just downriver from Quebec City -- the place that in the 1840s became one of the principal burial sites for victims of the Irish Famine of that decade.

The film "explores the various stories inspired by the immense Celtic Cross constructed in 1909 on Grosse-Île , a tiny island near Quebec City, which is the site of the largest cemetery outside Ireland connected with the Potato Famine of the 1840s. This film reflects on how and why the memories evoked by Grosse-Île have so dramatically shifted over the past century."


And the film is now also a website, where you can view the film and support materials online ( and from which we took the image here)