A scene from Passage, which reviews the history of Franklin's fatal voyage. (NFB) John Walker set out to redeem the character of Canada's Inuit people and Scottish explorer John Rae in his film, Passage, which is to screen this Sunday at the Atlantic Film Festival.

But to do that, he had to tear down the image of Sir John Franklin, a man who died trying to find the Northwest Passage and whose statue stands in London as a tribute to the age of Arctic exploration.

Franklin has no right to be lionized for his efforts to find the route across the top of Canada, Walker told CBC News on Thursday.

"It didn't happen. He got stuck in the ice and died and he did not discover the Northwest Passage," Walker said.

Walker's Passage is part of the documentary lineup at the Atlantic Film Festival, which opens Thursday with the feature film Blindness.

The Atlantic festival features Canadian films such as Atom Egoyan's Adoration and international films such as Surveillance, but also has a focus on Atlantic movies, including Halifax filmmaker Eric Bednarski's The Strangest Dream.

Walker, a respected Halifax documentary maker of films such as Fairy Faith and Men of the Deeps, based his documentary on Ken McGoogan's book Fatal Passage.

McGoogan argued that John Rae, the young Scottish sailor and doctor who found Franklin's ships with the help of indigenous people, was dismissed by British historians in part because the news he brought was so unwelcome.

Bad press for Rae's version of events

"This was a big media story — the story of the 'discovery' of the Northwest Passage was equivalent to the moon landing in our time. The Americans, the Russians, everybody was out there, and the great Sir John Franklin and his two ships had disappeared," Walker said.

Rae's news about what happened to the crew — and especially his stories of cannibalism —did not fit with the expectations of success among the tiny club of influential British adventurers.

"It did not go over very well, especially with Lady Franklin. She was able to spin the press …and she brought in an even bigger media star — Charles Dickens — to make the case that British gentlemen would not eat other British gentlemen," Walker said.

"He convinced the British public that it must have been the Inuit, those murderous savages. It was a scathing, racist attack against the Canadian Inuit."

The Inuit, who passed down the story of Franklin through oral tradition, told a much different tale.

Walker took Tagak Curley, an honoured Inuit statesman whose ancestors had been guides to Rae, to London to right the lies told about the Inuit.

"The thing I really wanted to add to the story was this idea of oral tradition — that this story was being kept alive in the Arctic through oral tradition," he said.

Curley's confrontation with a British naval historian and with the great-great grandson of Dickens are captured in Passage, which was acclaimed at Toronto's Hot Docs Film Festival earlier this year.

Another hero redeemed

Bednarski's debut documentary The Strangest Dream sets out to resurrect the story of Dr. Joseph Rotblat, the only scientist to leave the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb, saying it violated his moral beliefs.

Dr. Joseph Rotblat, the Polish-born scientist who founded the Pugwash movement, has been forgotten despite winning the Nobel Prize, says filmmaker Eric Bednarski. (NFB) Rotblat is almost forgotten, despite winning a Nobel Peace Prize in 1995, Bednarski told CBC News.

Branded a traitor and a spy, Rotblat went on to found the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, an international peace movement that had its first meeting in Nova Scotia in 1957.

"He was obviously a man who stuck to his principles," Bednarski said.

"He just felt uncomfortable working on this project that he knew would be used on a civilian population. And he knew that Nazi Germany was no longer pursuing an atomic bomb of their own and he could foresee the arms race….

"Some people would say he was stubborn, but he stuck to his principles and for the rest of his life he worked against weapons of mass destruction."

After the war, Rotblat applied his knowledge of physics to peaceful uses of atomic energy – including nuclear medicine and atomic power generation.

Working from a small office in London, he fought governments throughout the world who wanted to continue building nuclear weapons.

"He not only worked against all weapons of mass destruction, He hoped for a world without war," Bednarski said.

His film takes its title from the 1960s peace anthem Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,first performed by the Weavers and Rotblat's favourite song. The film has its debut at the festival Sunday.

The Atlantic Film Festival runs Sept. 11 to 20 in Halifax.