In 1919, a camera crew from New York was sent north – way north - capturing images of Canada’s indigenous people, fur trappers, traders and the brilliant, often hostile landscape they inhabited.

But what began as a propaganda film happily resulted in an exceptional historical record of a time that, in some respects, shows how little the region has changed in the intervening years.

According to the doc’s official site, “the film crew lugged their crates of gear by foot, canoe, dogsled and icebreaker, trudging through the Arctic, the boreal forest and up some of the fiercest rivers in the world.

“The filmmakers perched their cameras in places never before filmed. By the time they completed filming at the end of December [1919], they’d gathered 75,000 feet of film, some eight hours of viewing time. The footage was rushed to New York where editing began. By mid-April, a first draft was complete, and clocked in at four hours. A month later it was cut in half.”

The film debuted in 1920 in Winnipeg – HBC’s headquarters – but “soon after the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, barely a decade after The Romance of the Far Fur Country was filmed, the footage from the epic Hudson’s Bay Company film disappeared from public view, the canisters of nitrate film stock were packed away by the HBC in an archive in London for safe keeping— but lost to the world.”

Not so fast… experts found eight hours of raw footage in Britain, along with diary notes from the filmmakers and a new, two-hour version of the film was created. It screened recently in Edmonton and is expected to be taken to wider audiences soon.

This really is a remarkable and very lucky.  According to a story about the film recently run by the BBC, “The HBC Archives always knew the footage was in England, but it wasn't until 2011 that a transfer took place.

"Bringing these films back to Canada provides a window to the past," Maureen Dolyniuk, the keeper at the HBC Archives, tells the BBC, "not only for researchers and filmmakers, but for the residents of the communities captured in the films."