A Catholic missionary goes into the Canadian wilderness to find a lost mission and the journey challenges his most ardent convictions. The film is wonderfully photographed and has an air of cultural realism that has rarely been equaled. Awe and danger linger over nearly every scene, as the priest (Lothaire Bluteau) and his young European assistant (Aden Young) are accompanied by an increasingly disillusioned band of Huron Indians led by Chomina (August Schellenberg) whose daughter (Sandrine Holt) takes an interest in Daniel (Young) and in the process arouses strong sexual feelings in the celibate Father Laforgue(Bluteau) when he discovers them one evening making love. Faced with his sexual desire, he flogs himself, while in the meantime he's trying to convince the skeptical Hurons to convert. They can't understand him and his strange views or why in his Christian heaven there is no sex or tobacco. In the end, it earns him their deep mistrust. On finding the lost mission, a miracle considering all the dangers involved, he converts the inhabitants of the village, only to have them all killed by the non-believing Iriquois. Part a critique of the missionary movement, but more so a look at Laforgue's fight with his own faith and conviction, and a glorious picture of the cold and beautiful Canadian wilderness as it might have looked in the mid 17th century.