Frederick William Wallace was a journalist, photographer, historian and novelist. He is best known as the author of Wooden Ships and Iron Men, a now-classic 1924 book about the last days of the Age of Sail in Maritime Canada.
James Simmons Freer was a Canadian filmmaking pioneer.
Back to God's Country is a 1919 Canadian drama film directed by David Hartford. It is one of the earliest Canadian feature films. The film starred and was co-written by Canadian actress Nell Shipman. With an estimated budget of over $67,000, it was the most successful silent film in Canadian history.
The Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau, founded as the Exhibits and Publicity Bureau, was the film production agency of the Government of Canada administered by the Department of Trade and Commerce, and intended to promote trade and industry. Created in 1918, it was the first government film production organization in the world.
The Ontario Motion Picture Bureau was established by the Government of Ontario in 1917 and was the first state-founded film organization in the world, preceding the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau by a year. Its mandate was to carry out "educational work for farmers, school children, factory workers and other classes", to promote the province and its resources and "to encourage the building of highways and other public works". An extension of a growing movement to regulate theatres and films being shown in them, it was also established in an attempt to "counter the growing tide of un-British pictures being shown in theatres" throughout the province.
Blue Water is a lost 1924 Canadian silent film directed by David Hartford and starring Pierre Gendron, Jane Thomas, and Norma Shearer. It is the last feature produced by Ernest Shipman, and is the Montreal-born, future MGM star Shearer's only Canadian film. It had a commercial release in Saint John, New Brunswick, where it was shot, but no print is known to exist. The film failed to succeed commercially, marking Shipman's decline in success until his death in 1931. Without being distributed, the film was stored in a New York vault.
Hiawatha, the Messiah of the Ojibway is a 1903 dramatic short film shot in Canada directed by the American pioneering cinematographer and director Joe Rosenthal, based on the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's famous poem, The Song of Hiawatha, made in Desbarats, Ontario, with a cast of Ojibway First Nations people. According to the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, it was the first dramatic narrative film to be shot in Canada.
Ernest G. Shipman was Canada's most successful film producer during the silent period. Shipman, whose nickname was "Ten Percent Ernie," made seven features from 1919 to 1923.
