Subject: Frontiers
From wagon trains to star treks, humans have always been explorers, and frontiers are the places we go to meet the unknown, though rarely will it be where no man has gone before.
1492: Conquest of Paradise
- Director: Ridley Scott
- Release Date: 1992
- Production Country: France, Spain
When Columbus finds land while searching for a route to China, he believes this is his opportunity to start a new life with a new city under his rule... but the arrival of his ships has tragic consequences for the natives they encounter and Columbus struggles with the duties of leader. Meanwhile, back in Spain, forces there are conspiring against Columbus to strip him of all he has gained.
A Man Called Horse
- Director: Elliot Silverstein
- Release Date: 1970
- Production Country: United States
After years of enslavement by a band of Lakota, an English aristocrat realizes that his only chance of freedom is to adopt the ways of his captors—but freedom is not the same as escape. If he becomes civilized according to Lakota culture, enough so that he can move freely among them, will that render him unfit for England and her idea of "civilized" life if he should ever have the chance to return?
Alba de América (Dawn of America)
- Director: Juan de Orduña
- Release Date: 1951
- Production Country: Spain
Christopher Columbus convinces the Spanish Royal couple to finance his journey to look for a western route to China, and stumbles upon an entirely "New World."
Alyonka
- Director: Boris Barnet
- Release Date: 1961
- Production Country: Soviet Union
Traveling together, Russians returning from the Kazakh steppes bond over shared hardships, triumphs, and the journey home itself.
America Before Columbus
- Director: Cristina Trebbi
- Release Date: 2009
- Production Country: United States, Germany
The Americas, before the arrival of Columbus, was far from a pristine "New World," but had a vast and diverse history of peoples and empires, farms, and urban centers.
Cabeza de Vaca
- Director: Nicolás Echevarría
- Release Date: 1991
- Production Country: Mexico, Spain, United States, United Kingdom
Saved by a local Native American community, the survivors of an ill-fated Spanish expedition to Florida learn to navigate the complex societies of pre-Columbian North America, but years with a foreign people do not erase their longing for their own culture, so when they hear of a Spanish colony on the western shores of Mexico, they are determined to make the arduous journey home.
Centennial
- Director: Virgil W. Vogel, Paul Krasny, Harry Falk
- Release Date: 1978
- Production Country: United States
In a Colorado valley that will be called Centennial, a young Arapaho warrior befriends a Canadian trapper, unaware that the trapper is only the first of an oncoming tide of European immigrants. Years later in Centennial valley, a German miner plants potatoes and dreams of wealth, while a young English debutant has better business sense than any of the men in her life.
Dances with Wolves
- Director: Kevin Costner
- Release Date: 1990
- Production Country: United States, United Kingdom
A Lakota village find themselves bemused by a lone white Army officer posted to an abandoned fort near them. However, when a full troop of other white men shows up to occupy the fort, they quickly realize these men are anything but harmless.
Dersu Uzala (Dersu Uzala: The Hunter)
- Director: Akira Kurosawa
- Release Date: 1975
- Production Country: Soviet Union, Japan
A Russian soldier, Arsenyev, sent to explore Siberia is saved by a local huntsman, Dersu Uzala, and the two forge a deep friendship over their travels; but while Dersu Uzala is able to help Arsenyev navigate the wilds of his home, Arsenyev is unable to return the favor when he brings an old and increasingly blind Dersu Uzala to live with him in the city.
Duel at Diablo
- Director: Ralph Nelson
- Release Date: 1966
- Production Country: United States
Working as an Army scout while he searches for his wife's murderer, Jess Remsberg leads a troop of soldiers through Apache territory. However, he is unaware that the greatest danger to their safety is not the guns of their enemy, but the less-than-cordial relationship between a white woman (embittered by her rescue from the Apaches) and her surly husband.
Gunless
- Director: William Phillips
- Release Date: 2011
- Production Country: Canada
A hardened gunfighter takes refuge in a Canadian town after fleeing across the border to escape a lynching, but he finds it difficult to continue to live by the "Code of the West" when no one else in the village seems to care about either honor or guns.
Hudson's Bay
- Director: Irving Pichel
- Release Date: 1941
- Production Country: United States
Trapper Pierre Esprit Radisson has grand dreams for the far northern reaches of the North American continent as he wanders through the area, making friends with the natives, hunting, trapping, and, finally, rejecting his fellow Frenchmen to found the Hudson's Bay Company with the English.
Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly)
- Director: Sergio Leone
- Release Date: 1966
- Production Country: Italy, Spain, West Germany
A chance encounter with a dying Confederate officer forces two feuding bandits to work together once more as they search for gold that the officer hid before his death. Complicating their quest is a dangerous gunslinger, also after the treasure, as well as the Union and Confederate armies, whose battles keep getting in the way as the men desperately search for $200,000 in buried Confederate gold.
Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery
- Director: Ken Burns
- Release Date: 1997
- Production Country: United States
Lewis and Clark embark on a near-mythical cross-continental journey with great glory... and much tedium and difficulty.
Lonesome Dove
- Director: Simon Wincer
- Release Date: 1989
- Production Country: United States
In 1876, Texas has become disgustingly civilized, leading former rangers Gus McCrae and Woodrow McCall to trail a herd of cows up to Montana, their new adventures punctuated by encounters with the various women that Gus has loved, the son Woodrow can’t accept because his mother was a prostitute, and the treacherous outlaw, Blue Duck, whom Woodrow and Gus chased but never managed to capture throughout their careers as Texas Rangers.
Los conquistadores del Pacífico (Balboa)
- Director: José María Elorrieta
- Release Date: 1963
- Production Country: Spain, Italy
Settling in on an estate in Hispaniola with the proceeds of a previous expedition, Vasco Balboa increases his fortune and his political prominence as he explores and charts the Americas and becomes the first European to find the Pacific via the isthmus of Panama.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
- Director: Robert Altman
- Release Date: 1971
- Production Country: United States
A successful brothel helps to propel a sleepy, northwest mining community to prosperity, bringing it to the attention of a larger, predatory mining conglomerate. When the owner of the brothel, a former gambler with a bit of a reputation as a gunslinger, refuses to sell his business to the conglomerate as it takes over the town, the owners send a trio of hitmen after him.
Meek's Cutoff
- Director: Kelly Reichardt
- Release Date: 2010
- Production Country: United States
Five weeks in to what was supposed to be a two week trip, three Oregon-bound families are low on supplies and, more importantly, water, and begin to suspect that their guide, Stephen Meek, may have misled them when he promised them a shortcut. Unfortunately, their only other option for help is a Cayuse man who they’ve taken prisoner and they have to decide which runs deeper: their suspicions of Meek or their mistrust of this "strange savage" who could lead them to their gruesome end at the hands of his people.
Nova Zembla
- Director: Reinout Oerlemans
- Release Date: 2011
- Production Country: Netherlands
A young man joins the crew of a ship sailing north, into the arctic ocean, in search of an ocean passage to China, as he is desperate to prove his worth for the love of a pastor's daughter. Convinced by the captain, William Barentsz, the passage to China exists in the never-ending sunshine of the Arctic Ocean, the crew finds their expectations proved horribly wrong when they are trapped in the ice and forced to winter in the bleak, barren landscape of Nova Zembla.
Plymouth Adventure
- Director: Clarence Brown
- Release Date: 1952
- Production Country: United States
Religious separatist William Bradford leads his group of fundamentalist colonists to the New World, unaware of the fact that the captain of the their ship, the Mayflower, has been paid to land them far north of Virginia, their original goal. To complicate matters, the captain is falling in love with Bradford's wife—who might just return his affections.