Located just south of the Arctic Circle, Dawson City was the centre of the Canadian Gold Rush and the final stop for a distribution chain that sent prints and newsreels to the Yukon at the height of the silent film era. As the distributors no longer had any use for these now stale movies, the people of Dawson disposed of them in a variety of ways, including using them to fill in an unused public swimming pool. The now-famous Dawson City Collection was uncovered in 1978, when a bulldozer working its way through a parking lot dug up a horde of film cans, some containing films that were thought to have been lost forever.
In Dawson City: Frozen Time, director Bill Morrison (Decasia) draws on these rare, permafrost-protected silent films and newsreels, pairing them with archival footage, interviews, historical photographs, and an evocative score by Sigur Rós collaborator and composer Alex Somers, to create a poetic meditation on cinema’s past.
