Holiday Break Film Series

The Detroit Historical Museum and Dossin Great Lakes Museum will be open all week between the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.

From Monday, December 26 – Saturday, December 31, the Dossin Great Lakes Museum will feature daily film screenings at 1 p.m. each day in DeRoy Hall, including:

• Monday, December 26 – “Superior Lights on the Shipwreck Coast”

The voyageurs in Birch Bark canoes, the schooners, steamers and freighters; the Soo Locks, Lake Superior’s original life-saving service stations—it’s all in this documentary. Superior Lights on the Shipwreck Coast includes the first lighthouse on Lake Superior, Whitefish Point. Visit with Bertha (Endress) Rollo as she remembers living as a child in the Whitefish Point Lighthouse with her family and grandfather Keeper Robert Carlson. Other Lights featured in this video are: Point Iroquois, Crisp’s Point, Au Sable Point and the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, Grand Island North and the East Channel Light, the Munising Range Lights and Grand Marais Harbor Lights. Also include are the shipwrecks of the Myron and the most famous Great Lakes tragedy, the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Running time: 58 minutes.

• Tuesday, December 27 – “Sister Queens of the Great Lakes”

Take a Great Lakes cruise on the Sister Queens of the Great Lakes, with ports of call in Chicago, Mackinac Island, Munising, Houghton, Isle Royale, Duluth, Cleveland and Buffalo. Tour the cities at each stop, cross under the Duluth Aerial Lift Bridge, experience the Soo Locks and the St. Mary’s river, view the Straits of Mackinaw and tour Mackinac Island. See the Blue Water Bridge, the St. Clair river and Niagara Falls. This up-close onboard full-color film produced in the 1940s and 50s was a national promotion for these great white luxury liners of the Great Lakes, the S.S. North American and S.S. South American.Running time: 52 minutes.

• Wednesday, December 28 – “The Fitzgerald Tragedy”

Twenty years of documentary filmmaking and exclusive interviews with people closest to the disaster are presented in “The Fitzgerald Tragedy”—an historical narrative as told by those closest to the most famous ore carrier to ever sail the Great Lakes. Ship captains and crew members, Coast Guard personnel, lighthouse keepers, commercial fishermen, maritime historians, authors, divers and other maritime experts all give their theories and opinions as to what caused the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald’s demise on Lake Superior. Running time: 60 minutes

• Thursday, December 29 – “The Christmas Tree Ship”

The Rouse Simmons was a three-masted schooner which sank in Lake Michigan in a violent storm in 1912. The ship was bound for Chicago with a cargo of Christmas trees when it foundered off the coast of Two Rivers, Wisconsin, killing all on board. Running time: 35 minutes.

• Friday, December 30 – “Great Lakes, Ancient Shores: A Voyage into History”

 In August of 2008, Lt. Governor John Cherry presented a Coastal Zone Management Grant for $21,000 to Captain Luke Clyburn to support the Great Lakes research of the Noble Odyssey Foundation. This film documents the exciting underwater discoveries made in 2009, while promoting Michigan’s Maritime History and our precious Great Lakes. Running time: 25 minutes. 

• Saturday, December 31 – “Detroit Mob Confidential”

Detroit’s La Cosa Nostra faction is the most successful crime family in American history. "Detroit Mob Confidential" covers an entire century of mafia activity, from bootlegging to murder, from gambling to Jimmy Hoffa. Packed with interviews from current and former FBI agents, federal prosecutors, and mob associates, as well as hundreds of never before seen photos straight from the FBI files and the private family collection of Don Joe Zerilli, this film will astound you. Running time: 85 minutes.