Conquest (Lost Canadian film, 1998)

Canadian theatrical poster.

Status: Lost

Conquest is a 1998 film directed by Piers Haggard, starring Lothaire Bluteau and Tara Fitzgerald. The film follows an idealistic banker in the remote and desolate village of Conquest, Saskatchewan, who hopes to revitalize the fading community; when a woman arrives in town stranded with a broken car, he attempts to convince her to stay and run the local hardware store, leading the two to eventually fall in love.

The film was inspired by writer Rob Forsyth's visit to the real village of Conquest, in parricular by the Vietnamese owner of the local cafe, described by Forsyth as "the unhappiest woman I have ever seen in my life". Though the Vietnamese cafe owner remained in the finished film, CBC was uninterested in producing a film entirely centering on such a character, and so Forsyth would write the film focusing primarily on the romance between Bluteau and Fitzgerald's characters.^[1]

The film was released theatrically in Canada, later airing on CBC, and it was additionally shown on the Showtime channel in the United States. An old Amazon listing seems to prove the existence of a VHS release, but no copies have been found and the product reviews are for another film entirely.^[2]

Conquest was the last film directed by Piers Haggard, and was Rob Forsyth's last project released before his passing. Forsyth passed away in September of 1999, just over a year after Conquest's release, making it his second and final theatrical feature film after 1991's Clearcut.