Dawson City: Frozen Time

Using permafrost protected, rare silent films and newsreels, archival footage, interviews and historical photographs to tell the story, Dawson City: Frozen Time pieces together the bizarre true history of a collection of some 500 films dating from 1910s - 1920s, which were lost for over 50 years until being discovered buried in a sub-arctic swimming pool deep in the Yukon Territory in 1978. The original score is composed by Alex Somers (Captain Fantastic). The film depicts a unique history of this 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 into a gold mining town, and then a vault of memories from the culture that displaced it. Dawson City, located about 350 miles south of the Arctic Circle, is situated at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers and rests on a bed of permafrost. Historically, the area was an important hunting and fishing camp for a nomadic First Nation tribe known as Tr'ondek Hwech'in. The town was settled in 1896 upon the discovery of gold in its creeks, and it became the center of the Klondike Goldrush that brought 100,000 prospectors to the area that year--the same year the world was introduced to commercial cinema with the advent of new large-scale projectors, and the "movie theater".