"History would be an excellent thing, if only it were true," claimed Tolstoy. Master documentarian John Walker takes us on an epic adventure involving racism, cannibalism and a cover-up by British authorities that credited the wrong man with the discovery of the Northwest Passage. The film is based on the lives of Dr. John Rae, explorer for the Hudson's Bay Company, and Sir John Franklin, British Royal Navy officer and leader of an ill-fated 1840s Arctic expedition. Stunningly cinematic, the film follows a trail from London to the Orkney Islands to Nunavut, elegantly slipping between past and present, drama and documentary, observational and self-reflexive cinema, to present the forces that made Franklin a hero and banished Rae to the margins of history. A cast of actors—as well as Inuit statesman Tagak Curley, author Ken McGoogan and the great-grandson of Charles Dickens—join the director to unravel an historic fraud and set the record straight. Lynne Fernie