With the attendance at the Nov. 11 Remembrance Day ceremonies better than ever, it is evident that Canadians have started to acknowledge our military heritage and maybe even take pride in it.

However, one area of our military history is still lacking as was shown by the History Channel, when after its week of documentaries, needed to play Saving Private Ryan, since if there is one thing that we are worse at than making a hockey movie is making a war movie.

From Dieppe to Juno Beach, Vimy Ridge or Arthur Currie, the general who lead the Canadians to victory there, a wealth of Canadian history remains ignored on film.

There haven’t been many big screen Canadian war movies, but one of the few was last year’s First World War epic (always a good sign) Passchendale  which was co-produced, written, directed and starred in by Paul Gross, who in the movie’s finale, had himself nailed to a cross after doing some battlefield nailing of his own.

As usual, such as with Saving Private Ryan, American movies dominate the historical battlefield, whether they were there or not, such as U-571, or whether they even won, such as with movies about the Alamo, Pearl Harbor or Black Hawk Down, which was the story of the American battle in Mogadishu in 1993.

Much of what has been put on film has come from the good folks at the National Film Board with documentaries such as Billy Bishop and The Kid Who Couldn't Miss, or Death by Moonlight, on Canada’s contribution to the bombing missions of the Second World War.

It isn’t that there is a lack of source material for Canadian film producers to work with, since much of Canadian military history remains unexplored on film. Yet much of the material is considered not popular with Canadians such as the story of George Buerling, one of Canada’s most famous fighter aces from the Second World War, to Canadian army soldier Rob Furlong, who holds the record for the longest sniper kill in history at 2,430 metres, which he made in Afghanistan in 2002.

Other material also remains off screen such as the Korean War, or movies about the development of the corvette for convoy operations in the North Atlantic, the Ross rifle controversy or Canadian soldiers who came under the first gas attack of the First World War.

More recent history from the Balkan wars has also been left ignored, although CBC journalist Carol Off wrote a book, ‘The Ghosts of Medak Pocket: the Story of Canada's Secret War,’ about the 1993 battle between Croatian and Canadian forces, which at the time was one of the heaviest actions engaged in by Canadian forces since Korea.

It took over 100 years of hockey before we finally made a good movie with The Rocket and hopefully it won’t take that long again before we make a good Canadian war movie, because we’ve seen enough of Paul Gross getting action on the battlefield.