“An artful and cinematic synthesis of human and animal nature, The Herd is a bellwether film” (POV Magazine). One of the most ambitious documentaries ever made in Canada, The Herd combines archival footage, stunning location photography and re-enactments to tell the entirely true story of a 1,500 mile reindeer drive from Alaska to the Mackenzie Delta in 1929. Instigated by the federal government in an ill-planned, self-serving attempt to provide starving Inuit communities with sustenance, the quest grows more and more absurd, abstract and mythic as it drags on; though slated for eighteen months, it lasts for six years. The key players are a very mixed bag: a know-it-all Danish botanist (Feore) who’s convinced only he knows how to make the trek work; an American entrepreneur (David Hemblen), amazed by his own generosity; Ottawa bureaucrats who spend most of their days in self-promotion (McKellar and Jim Allodi); and the man in charge of the drive, sixty-two-year-old Laplander Andy Bahr (voiced by Greene), a reindeer herder by profession and a philosopher by temperament. When not completely disregarding his apparent objectives and running the trek wildly off course, Bahr is fond of Zen-like paradoxes. Called to account for the delays, Bahr responds, “I make haste, slowly.” Fact and myth, experience and theory, self-interest and altruism collide as the principals struggle for both real and intellectual control over the quest. Pynchonian in its portrait of irreconcilable perspectives trapped in an irresolvable battle, the film is consistently “incisive, intelligent, utterly absorbing” (Take One).