Dawson City: Frozen Time

Dawson City: Frozen Time, directed by Bill Morrison, had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 5, 2016, and is based on a real event. In 1978, during a construction project in Dawson City, Yukon, 533 reels of nitrate film were discovered buried as landfill under an old swimming pool; they turned out to be silent films and newsreels from 1908 to 1922. Dawson City, founded during the 1896 Klondike Gold Rush, was the last stop on the silent film distribution chain, so films that had been screened accumulated rather than being sent back; when storage ran out, some were burned or dumped in the river, and the rest buried under a swimming pool. The permafrost physically preserved these films for fifty years; the recovered footage includes coverage of the 1919 World Series. Morrison assembles the archival footage without narration, using only title cards and a score by composer Alex Somers. Who it's for: anyone curious about a documentary telling the real discovery story of hundreds of presumed lost silent films, preserved for fifty years by frozen ground under a swimming pool. Who it's not for: viewers wanting a conventional, narrated documentary, since the film is built entirely from archival footage, title cards, and music.