This is the most realistic depiction of Native Americans I have seen in the wide screen. The movie sets in the year 1634, roughly 20 years after the founding of Quebec and 14 years after the landing of the Mayflower. Samuel de Champlain is still the governor of the precariously held French settlement.



Historical background: Champlain had earlier accompanied a party of Huron and/or Abenaki in an incursion south, along the shores of the lake he named after himself. They came across a party of Iroquois near today's Ticonderoga and, in the ensuing battle, Champlain shot the leader of the Iroquois party, thus deciding the encounter. The Iroquois never forgot and from that moment on they became rivals of both the French and the northern Indians.



The movie: It is in that context that the Jesuits decide to send another priest to the Huron Mission, upstream the Saint Lawrence, along the shores of Lac Frontenac (now lake Ontario).



The savage beauty of the landscapes is breathtaking. The cruelty of the Canadian winter is powerfully conveyed in all its splendor. The movie makes a very successful effort to portray the Native Americans as they were: bound by their own set of rules, fears, and beliefs, totally alien to Europeans but not so to the young French-Canadian. The end of the movie (which I will not describe here) was a direct consequence of M. Champlain shot at Ticonderoga.

This is a film that touches the soul.