In 1919 the Hudson’s Bay Company, commissioned a documentary for the 250th anniversary of the business. It was an elegiac love letter entitled: The Romance of the Far Fur Country. For many historians, the fur trade (the bread and butter of the HBC) was responsible for paving the way for a modern Canada. Romance was photographed by American documentarian Harold M Wycoff. But although he trekked by steamer, canoe and dog sled for six months, carrying pounds of equipment, time was not kind to his cinematic oddity; it was the first documentary epic of its type, predating Nanook of the North by two years, yet its nitrate reels were nearly lost amongst the stacks in the BFI’s London archives.

Fast-forward nearly 100 years and two intrepid Winnipeg-based filmmakers figured it was time to not only restore the nearly forgotten silent film, but also follow in Wycoff’s footsteps. Kevin and Chris Nikkel brought excerpts of the original documentary with them as they returned to communities the original film crew passed through in 1919. From Nunavut to Vancouver Island to Fort McMurray, men and women peer at iPads and gather at screenings of the archive footage. In bemused voices they point and say: ‘yes, that’s my great-great-grandfather…’ or ‘my grandmother…she just died recently at 104. You just missed her.’ This direct connection with history is what makes On the Trail so fascinating.

The Nikkels juxtapose archive and contemporary footage nicely. Where the filmmakers were once clad in animal furs and hand cranking their cameras, they’re now kitted out in Gore-Tex, shooting on digital and traversing the wilderness on ATVs. They also make good use of voiceover narration through the reading of Wycoff’s 1919 diaries and letters.

Where the original film was a romantic and colonial celebration of capitalism in the face of an unrelentingly difficult wilderness, the Nikkels’s film is very much concerned about the resurgence and active maintenance of indigenous cultural memory (as a Canadian, it was exciting to see so many young voices representing first nations; despite generations of systematic cultural genocide, these ancient communities are surviving), while also making parallels between the fur trade and the now infamous oil industry in northern Alberta.

That’s where they fall short. They clearly want On The Trail to be a historical documentary more than anything else, so although it follows tangents of indigenous autonomy and maintaining the traditions of oral cultures, it suffers from not addressing these issues head-on within a contemporary context of policy. Ultimately though, that is a mild critique of what is an incredibly exhaustive and unique filmmaking and restoration project.

You can find more information about the original 1920 film and the current film project here.

Showing as part of Glasgow Film Festival 2015