Coming to VOD today, Tuesday, October 3:
DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME
Director:
Bill Morrison
Premiere:
Venice 2016
Select Festivals:
New York Film Festival, London, Rotterdam, Göteborg, Thessaloniki Doc, BAFICI, It’s All True, Docs Against Gravity, Seattle, Melbourne, EBS Doc, Sydney
About:
Lost films discovered preserved in the Yukon permafrost are used to tell the story of their origins.
In the remote Canadian town of Dawson City in 1978, a cache of nitrate films were unearthed during the excavation of an old hockey rink for a construction project. The Dawson City Film Find contained more than 500 silent film reels, many long believed lost. From this beginning, Morrison turns back the clock to the foundation of the town amid the Klondike Gold Rush, displacing First Nations people in the process, and creatively uses clips from the discovered films, together with old newsreels and other archival materials, to trace Dawson City’s history up through 1978 – with some curious but fitting diversions about money, industry, and capitalism – explaining in the process how the films ended up in the permafrost. The result is an artful, fascinating excavation of time and place, all through a deep love for film.
what (not) to doc 