2017 Dawson City Film Festival Film Fest program | Page 6

THURSDAY, APRIL 13, 7:30
DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME
Bill Morrison (US, 2016, 120 minutes)
A special Canadian sneak preview of Dawson City: Frozen Time, scheduled
for theatrical and home video release later this year.
In attendance: Filmmaker Bill Morrison, and two of the film’s subjects and
key researchers, Kathy Jones-Gates, Director, Dawson Museum 1974-1986
and Michael Gates, Curator of Collections, Parks Canada 1977-1996.
“It is a story that is told, using these same films from the collection. It is both
a cinema of mythology, and mythologizing of cinema. Gold and Silver, forever
linked and following one another, drove the narrative in a unique chapter of
human civilization.” (Bill Morrison, 2016)
A film that pieces together the bizarre true history of a collection of 533 films
dating from the 1910s to 1920s, which were lost for over 50 years until being
discovered buried in a sub-arctic swimming pool deep in the Yukon Territory.
Using these permafrost protected, rare silent films and newsreels, archival
footage, interviews and historical photographs to tell the story, and
accompanied by an enigmatic score by Sigur Rós collaborator and composer
Alex Somers (Captain Fantastic), Dawson City: Frozen Time depicts a unique
history of a Canadian gold rush town by chronicling the life cycle of a
singular film collection through its exile, burial, rediscovery, and salvation
– and through that collection, how a First Nation hunting camp was
transformed and displaced.
Historically, the area was an important hunting and fishing camp for a
nomadic First Nation tribe known as Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in. The town was
settled in 1896 – the same year large-scale cinema projectors were invented
– and it became the center of the Klondike Goldrush that brought 100,000
prospectors to the area. The Dawson Amateur Athletic Association (DAAA)
opened in 1902 and began showing films and soon, the city became the final
stop for a distribution chain that sent prints and newsreels to the Yukon. The
films were seldom, if ever, returned.
By the late 1920s, 500,000 feet of film – 500 films – had accumulated in
the basement of the local Library, under the care of the Canadian Bank of
Commerce. In 1929, Clifford Thomson, bank employee and treasurer of the
local hockey association, moved the films to the town’s hockey rink, stacked
and covered them with boards and a layer of earth. The now famous Dawson
City Collection was uncovered in 1978 when a new recreation center was
being built and a bulldozer working its way through a parking lot dug up a
horde of film cans.
Screening courtesy Hypnotic Pictures and Picture Palace Pictures.
Thanks to Bill Morrison and Madeleine Molyneaux.
NOTE: This is a separate ticket event not included in a festival
pass. $10 general admission.
SCREENING SPONSORS
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