Dawson City: Frozen Time

Dawson City: Frozen Time (USA, 2017) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM. Director Bill Morrison reconstructs one of cinema history's stranger chapters: around 500 nitrate film prints from the 1910s and 1920s lay buried under a condemned swimming pool in the Yukon for over half a century before a bulldozer struck them in 1978.

Dawson City, roughly 350 miles below the Arctic Circle, was the dead end of the distribution chain during the Klondike Gold Rush. Studios shipped prints north and never recalled them. Some reels were burned, others dumped into the Yukon River — only the batch shoveled into the permafrost survived. Among them: newsreels, comedies, and footage of real events long thought gone.

Morrison builds the film from archival images and the recovered prints themselves, treating deteriorating nitrate as a visual texture rather than pure loss. The result lands somewhere between film history and a meditation on what time does to images. Stream Dawson City: Frozen Time (2017) on iFILM.