Dawson City: Frozen Time

Dawson City: Frozen Time pieces together the bizarre true history of a collection of some 500 films dating from 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, in Dawson City, located about 350 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Using archival footage to tell the story, the film 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.

Read more

Bill Morrison's Dawson City: Frozen Time Unearths a Trove of Combustible Cinema

The story moves to a massive cache of early 20th-century films uncovered in the 1970s in Dawson City, Canada, which allows Morrison to launch into a leisurely portrait of the Yukon Gold Rush, Dawson City’s origins and growth (where, among a great many others, Fredick Trump began his fortune, with a brothel), the industrialization of mining, World War I, the interwar combat between labor and...