Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016)

Dawson City: Frozen Time: Directed by Bill Morrison. With Michael Gates, Kathy Jones-Gates, Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, Frank Barrett. The history of Dawson City, the gold rush town that had a historical treasure of forgotten silent films buried in permafrost for decades until 1978.

“Frozen Time is a sophisticated documentary and an astonishing feat of film editing that combines still images and previously lost footage from the silent film era that was literally unearthed by archaeologists in Dawson City in 1978. Used as back-fill and buried for fifty years, over 500 reels of highly combustible nitrate film lay forgotten in an abandoned swimming pool, over which a hockey rink was constructed. Using clips from these restored films and newsreels, as well as early still images, Morrison retells the story of the 1890s Gold Rush and the history of Dawson City and its people within the context of world events (Klaus Ming December 2017).”