Dawson City: Frozen Time

Archival footage, rare silent films and newsreels, interviews and historical photographs narrate the bizarre true history of a collection of more than 500 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. The greatest archivist-filmmaker of our times creates a unique quasi-embroided filmic collage, made by fragile raw materials, about a fragile reality that moves on thin ice.
Screening Schedule

No physical screenings scheduled.

Script: Bill Morrison
Editing: Bill Morrison
Sound: John Somers
Music: Alex Somers
Production: Hypnotic Pictures, Picture Palace Pictures
Producers: Madeleine Molyneaux, Bill Morrison
Format: Color-B&W
Production Country: USA
Production Year: 2016
Duration: 120
Contact: Picture Palace Pictures picturepalacesale@yahoo.com

Bill Morrison

Bill Morrison has been called “the poet laureate of lost films” (New York Times, 9/21/2021), as he often makes films that reframe long-forgotten moving images. He has premiered feature-length documentary films at the New York, Sundance, Telluride, and Venice film festivals. Morrison has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Alpert Award, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, as well as production grants from Creative Capital, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Arté – La Lucarne. He had a mid-career retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in 2014. His found footage opus Decasia (2002) was the first film of the 21st century to be named to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. The Great Flood (2013) received the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award for historical scholarship. Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) was included on over 100 critics’ lists of the best films of the year and was later listed as one of the best films of the decade by the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, and Vanity Fair, among others. In 2021, Morrison became a member of the documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. His most recent feature-length doc, The Village Detective: A Song Cycle (2021) had its North American premiere at the 2021 Telluride Film Festival and was released by Kino Lorber theatrically and on home video in North America. Incident (2023) premiered at the 2023 Visions du Réel Film Festival, and won the best short film award at the inaugural edition of the UnArchive Film Festival held in Rome.

Filmography

1992 Footprints (short)
2000 Ghost Trip (short)
2002 Decasia
2004 Gotham (short)
2008 Dystopia (short)
2010 Spark of Being 
2013 The Great Flood
2016 Dawson City: Frozen in Time
2018 The Unchanging Sea (short)
2021 The Village Detective: a Song Cycle
2023 The Incident (short)