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Dawson City: Frozen Time pieces together the bizarre true history of a long-lost collection of 533 nitrate film prints discovered buried under the permafrost in the Canadian town of Dawson City. Located about 350 miles south of the Arctic Circle, Dawson City was settled in 1896 – the same year large-scale cinema projectors were invented – and became the centre of the Klondike Gold Rush that brought 100,000 prospectors to the area. Soon after, 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, over 500,000 feet of film had accumulated in the basement of the local library. Much of it was eventually moved to the town's hockey rink, where it was stacked and covered with boards and a layer of earth. The now-famous Dawson City Collection was uncovered in 1978 when a new recreation centre was being built and a bulldozer working its way through a parking lot dug up a horde of film cans. Bill Morrison draws on these permafrost-protected, rare silent films and newsreels, pairing them with archival footage, interviews, historical photographs, and an enigmatic score by Sigur Rós collaborator and composer Alex Somers. Dawson City: Frozen Time depicts the unique history of this Canadian Gold Rush town by chronicling the life cycle of a singular film collection through its exile, burial, rediscovery, and salvation.

Ages 15+