With echoes of his acclaimed 1998 feature The Red Violin, writer/director Francois Girard spins a centuries-spanning yarn, drawing parallels thematically and visually between wildly disparate characters who quite literally share common ground.

When a sinkhole swallows a large portion of a Canadian college stadium’s football field, it opens a window into the history of this specific place, revealing generations of cultural and religious divides, of violent conflict and shared ancestry. Bookending the eras are a modern-day Mohawk archaeologist and an ancient-times warrior, who share the name Asigny and the mission of keeping the stories of the land alive. Glimpses of the intervening centuries include a 1600s French settler passionately in love with an Algonquin woman, French rebels on the run from English redcoats, and the contemporary battle of sporting events.

Expansive, ambitious and beautifully shot, Hochelaga collapses hundreds of years of history into an immersive, interconnected series of episodes strung together by the unifying thread of North America’s Native peoples.

In competition for the FIPRESCI Prize.