Spycraft

When a middle-aged Canadian woman, who is also a hidden Jew, joins the British Special Operations Executive during WWII as a spy in occupied France, her male colleague is skeptical she’ll make a difference because she’s a woman – and an ‘old’ one at that. However, she defies expectations and challenges the chauvinism and ageism of the times by using her invisibility as an asset, and using a classically female craft to pass coded intelligence about the Germans to the Allies: knitting.

Produced by writer-producers Kirk Dunn and Claire Ross Dunn’s A Yarn or Two Arts Collective, Spycraft was born out of the research the two did for their show, The Knitting Pilgrim, about Kirk’s 15-year journey knitting three giant panels, designed in the style of stained-glass windows, which look at the relationship amongst the Abrahamic faiths. The writers discovered that women used knitting during WWII to spy on the Nazis: either by eavesdropping on them in plain sight, because no one felt threatened by female knitters, or by knitting code into ordinary garments to get the message out undetected.