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Early Canadian Exploration (1600s-1800s) (13)

  1. Available in English Options
5 years old
18 years old
  • Alexander Mackenzie: The Lord of the North
    Alexander Mackenzie: The Lord of the North
    David Bairstow 1964 27 min
    Filmed on the great Mackenzie River, this short fiction film recreates the amazing voyage of the man who gave his name to it. Following the path outlined in Mackenzie's journal, the film depicts his arduous journey by canoe all the way to the salt water of the Arctic Ocean - one of the great epics of northern exploration.
  • Dreams of a Land
    Dreams of a Land
    Robert Doucet 1987 8 min
    Animated drawings illustrate the life and explorations of Samuel de Champlain, founder of Québec City. The film follows Champlain from his first ambitions to map the New World and discover a passage to the sea, to his later dreams for New France.
  • David Thompson: The Great Mapmaker
    David Thompson: The Great Mapmaker
    Bernard Devlin 1964 28 min
    This short film recreates the story of David Thompson – a man who, over the course of his lifetime, mapped a-million-and-a-half square miles of uncharted territory. His achievement remains unsurpassed.
  • Fragments of Lost History
    Fragments of Lost History
    2000 50 min
    The yellowed pages of a travel journal, a letter unearthed by chance, photographs recovered from a company's dusty archives: These are but a few of the scattered materials used to reconstruct the fascinating and little known adventure of Revillon Brothers, a Parisian merchant of elegant furs, who came to Canada at the turn of the century to enter into the fur trade. But the adventure comes to an end in 1936 when Revillon's great rival, the Hudson's Bay Company, buys out the French company. Victorious, the Hudson's Bay Company, is the only of the two to be remembered in the history books. In between the words of the few remaining witnesses to a lost history, in the memories of descendants of employees and in specialists' passion for the fragments recovered, a world long thought vanished is recreated in front of our eyes. In French with English subtitles.
  • Footprints
    Footprints
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    Carole Poliquin  &  Yvan Dubuc 2014 1 h 25 min
    The renowned actor Roy Dupuis discovers how our historic encounter with the First Nations was a determining factor in the construction of Quebec’s collective indentity.
  • Ikwe
    Ikwe
    Norma Bailey 1986 57 min
    Part of the Daughters of the Country series, this dramatic film features a young Ojibwa girl from 1770 who marries a Scottish fur trader and leaves home for the shores of Georgian Bay. Although the union is beneficial for her tribe, it results in hardship and isolation for Ikwe. Values and customs clash until, finally, the events of a dream Ikwe once had unfold with tragic clarity.
  • The Last Voyage of Henry Hudson
    The Last Voyage of Henry Hudson
    Richard Gilbert 1964 28 min
    This short film realistically portrays the conflict Henry Hudson experienced when he went in search of an open water route to the Orient, and no one would follow him. What he discovered instead was an inland sea, a discovery that ended in tragedy.
  • Mission of Fear
    Mission of Fear
    Fernand Dansereau 1965 1 h 19 min
    The story of the Jesuit martyrs who lived with the Wendat converts in the region near what is now Midland, Ontario. The film is of wide interest since it reconstructs a period of Canadian history, especially of Indigenous life, at the very beginning of European settlement. The village and the Jesuits' buildings are exact models from archeologists' reconstructions. The story is based on the Jesuit Relations, the actual journals of mission life that still make for thrilling reading.

  • Passage
    Passage
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    John Walker 2008 1 h 48 min
    With a unique blend of dramatic action and behind-the-scenes documentary footage, filmmaker John Walker shares the multi-layered story of British explorer Sir John Franklin and his crew of 128 men, who perished in the Arctic ice during an ill-fated attempt to discover the Northwest Passage, and John Rae, the Scottish doctor who in 1851, discovered their dismal fate. Rae's dark report, which described the crew’s madness and cannibalism, did not sit well with Sir John's widow, Lady Franklin, nor with many others in British society, including Charles Dickens. They waged a bitter public campaign to discredit Rae's version of events and mark an entire nation of northern Inuit with the label of murderous cannibals. A stunning face-to-face meeting between the great-great grandson of Charles Dickens and Tagak Curley, an honoured Inuit statesman who challenges the fraudulent history, vaults the story from the past into the present and we are witness to history in the making.
  • Shining Mountains - Land of Riches
    Shining Mountains - Land of Riches
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    Guy Clarkson 2005 47 min
    This documentary from the Shining Mountains series explores the discovery of the Rockies by retracing the footsteps of its earliest European visitors. At first nothing more than an obstacle to fur trading, the Rockies became, with the arrival of the first CPR train, an all-too accessible Shangri-La, a playground for Easterners armed with easels, cameras and climbing gear. Here, the filmmaker joins modern-day adventurers and historians to relive these early explorations. It's a journey by dog team, locomotive, canoe and climbing party to the roof of the Canadian Rockies. From there, one can almost see forever, and that's the problem. The future is cause for concern.
  • The Vinland Mystery
    The Vinland Mystery
    William Pettigrew 1984 28 min
    This short documentary depicts the search, discovery and authentication of the only known Norse settlement in North America - Vinland the Good. Mentioned in Icelandic manuscripts and speculated about for over two centuries, Vinland is known as "the place where the wild grapes grow" and was thought to be on the eastern coast between Virginia and Newfoundland. In 1960 a curious group of house mounds was uncovered at l'Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland by Drs. Helge Ingstad and Anne Stine Ingstad of Norway. Added to the United Nations World Heritage List, l'Anse aux Meadows is considered one of the most important archaeological sites in the world.
  • The Voyageurs
    The Voyageurs
    1964 19 min
    This short film tells the tale of the men who drove big freighter canoes into the wilderness in the days when the fur trade was Canada's biggest business. The film recreates scenes of the early 19th century with a soundtrack by an all-male chorus.
  • Wolfe and Montcalm
    Wolfe and Montcalm
    Allan Wargon 1957 29 min
    This short film recreates the tense hours before the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, and then the battle itself in which both generals, Wolfe and Montcalm, were fatally wounded.