Screening Dates
  • November 9, 2017 6:30
Free Admission

“Extraordinary … An investigation of knowledge and representation worthy of Werner Herzog or Chris Marker.”

Tom McSorley, Take One

Peter Mettler, the visionary Canadian cinematographer (Manufactured Landscapes) and director (Gambling, Gods and LSD), sets out to film the unfilmable in this awe-inspiring documentary. Mettler’s impossible quest, which takes him to chilly Churchill, Manitoba, with a small crew and a specially-designed camera, is to capture the Northern Lights on celluloid. The quixotic effort yields truly wondrous visual results and a wealth of other heady pleasures: explanations, scientific and spiritual, for the aurora borealis phenomenon; memorable portraits of the eccentrics inhabiting Churchill’s subarctic environs; the filmmaker musing, philosophically and ironically, on his mission, his medium, and our modern devotion to images.

preceded by

Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper
Canada 1972
David Rimmer
9 min. 16mm

In Vancouver experimenter David Rimmer’s mesmerizing structuralist short, a fragment of found footage depicting a female factory worker shaking out large sheets of cellophane is repurposed, via image looping and optical-printing manipulation, into something wondrously alchemical and almost otherworldly. Set to a propulsive soundtrack by Don Druick.

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