The Woman Conquers

Part of the Daughters of the Country series, this film, set in the 1850s, unfolds against the backdrop of the Hudson's Bay Company's monopoly of the fur trade. In protest, some Métis engage in trade with the Americans. Madeleine, the Métis common-law wife of a Hudson's Bay Company clerk, is torn between loyalty to her husband and loyalty to her brother, a freetrader. Even more shattering, a change in company policy destroys Madeleine's happy and secure life, forcing her to re-evaluate her identity.

Filmed on location in Saskatchewan from the Qu'Appelle Valley to Hudson Bay, the documentary traces the filmmaker's quest for her Native foremothers in spite of the reluctance to speak about Native roots on the part of her relatives. The film articulates Métis women's experience with racism in both current and historical context, and examines the forces that pushed them into the shadows.

A documentary film exploring an untold part of Canada’s past through the eyes of Inuk artist and filmmaker Elisapie Isaac. After facing a moral dilemma, Elisapie sets out to meet others who, like her, are “Hudson Baybies,” the children born of the mixed unions between Indigenous women and Hudson’s Bay Company employees working in trading posts and general stores across the North.

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.

In this surreal, overstated, black-and-white film by Marcel Schuepbach, a young woman is slowly driven to near insanity by an inner desire for a passionate existence, while she lives a dull life at her grandmother's country home. The grandmother recalls how her own daughter lost hold of sanity and died on her lover's grave -- and she begins to see similarities in her granddaughter's behavior.