by Jason Daniel Baker

Created on: March 28, 2009

Passchendaele (2008) Starring Paul Gross, Gil Bellows, Caroline Dhavernas, Joe Dinicol, Meredith Bailey, Jim Mezon, Michael Greyeyes, Adam Harrington, James Kot, Jesse Frechette, Rainer Kahl, Landon Liboiron, Patricia Benedict, Hugh Probyn, Brian Dooley, Robert Nogier, Francis Damberger, David Ley, Judith Buchan, David Brown, Chad Nobert, Lois Holley, Stafford Lawrence, Marty Antonini, James Defelice, Sean Anthony Olsen, Ryan Cowie, Jayson Therrien, Don Bland, Brian Jensen, Joe Desmond, Christopher Myles, David Lereaney, Jeffrey Watson, David Haysom, Stephen Warner, Alex Arsenault, Justin Michael Carriere, Tom Carey, Chris Ippolito, Brett Manyluk, Jason Cermak, Joseph Allan Sutherland, Ross Crockett, C. Adam Leigh.

Directed by Paul Gross.

Running time: 114 minutes

Rating: PG/14A

Canadians fighting in the Battle of Passchendaele during the First World War made history at a terrible cost.

This film details the odyssey of Sergeant Michael Dunne, a Canadian soldier who bears both national and personal loyalties in returning to the front after having suffered post-traumatic schock from his first tour of duty. Shattered emotionally, haunted by terrifying memories and threatened with being shot for cowardice for having gone Absent Without Official Leave, Dunne still finds time to fall for a nurse at the military hospital in Calgary he is in.

Dunne (Gross's real-life grandfather), given an easy and safe job at a recruitment station elects to go back to centre of military action in order to protect David Mann (Dinicol), the brother of Sarah (Dhavernas), the woman who nursed him back to health and his one true love. In so doing he earns redemption, and learns to forgive himself.

Canadians, whom Americans today delight in calling "peaceniks" when they are not outright accusing us of cowardice had died in the thousands in both World Wars before Americans ever seriously even entertained intervening. Well over a hundred Canadians have now died fighting in Afghanistan mainly because an American building got destroyed (with two dozen Canadians in it). You won't get any Hollywood movie telling those stories or this one.

This film cost an estimated $20 million Canadian to make (that is about $16 million American roughly) which is easily a record for a Canadian film. As I have said before you can't put a price on patriotism in a country where that quality is as understated as it is in Canada.

The film is almost a metaphor in and of itself for the way Canadians have sacrificed themselves

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