At our Capuchin archives in Pittsburgh, PA, we've digitized some of our videos that would no longer be available to posterity when the last VHS cassette player is laid to rest (and most may have already gone to their eternal pastures or friary basements?). The most recent is an important film in our Province story: And Then Came Dawn.
And Then Came Dawn, highlighting our mission work in Papua New Guinea which had begun in 1955, was filmed in the early '70s and produced by Karl-Heinz Stellmach, the photographer who filmed the outdoor scenes of Austria in the film The Sound of Music in the early '60s. The film was shown on national public television stations in Spring of 1973.
The Pittsburgh showing on WQED-TV was on Sunday, April 8th, 1973, at Noon, and arrived with a lot of fanfare among our brothers. It was acclaimed as a "masterpiece of anthropology and mission documentation." [Carnegie Alumni News, March 1973] The Pittsburgh incarnation included all three segments of the production in a 90-minute presentation. Now that it's been digitized from a VHS tape you can view all three together on our posted video. And we found quite a few faces of friars in their younger days as you can see in the collage.
The video is on our Capuchin Vimeo pages. Or you can view it below . . .