DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME was named to the following critics' best films of the decade lists:

BEST FILMS of 2010s
Jake Coyle and Lindsey Bahr, Associated Press
Jamie Dunn, The Skinny (UK)
Glenn Kenny, New York Times, RogerEbert.com
Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair
Matthew Lucas, From the Front Row
Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

BEST DOCUMENTARIES of 2010s
Monica Castillo, The Wrap
Kenji Fujishima and staff, Paste Magazine
Alissa Wilkinson, Vox

​This film presentation will be accompanied by a live performance of the score by L.A.’s contemporary ensemble Wild Up and a woman’s choir from Tonality.​

“An instantaneously recognizable masterpiece.” – The New York Times
A hallucinatory cinematic fever dream, Dawson City: Frozen Time tells the bizarre true story of some 533 silent film reels, dating from the 1910s and 20s, that accumulated at the end of a film distribution line in northwestern Canada and which were miraculously discovered some 50 years later, in 1978, buried in a sub-arctic swimming pool, deep in the Yukon permafrost. Filmmaker Bill Morrison (Decasia, The Miners’ Hymns, The Great Flood) deftly combines excerpts from this remarkable collection with historical footage, photographs, and original interviews, to explore the complicated history of Dawson City, a Canadian Gold Rush town founded across the river from a First Nation hunting camp, and then traces how the development of that town both reflected and influenced the evolution of modern Cinema.
Combined with a powerful, evocative score by Alex Somers ( Captain Fantastic; Hale County This Morning, This Evening; Honey Boy), orchestrated and arranged by Ricardo Romaneiro, Dawson City: Frozen Time is a triumphant work of art that spins the life cycle of a singular film collection into a breath-taking history of the 20th century.

"As haunting a film as there was this decade, Bill Morrison’s painstakingly stitched-together collage of old movie footage pulls us into a semi-distant past full of forgotten life. Dawson City: Frozen Time is, most literally, a documentary about the discovery of over 500 silent-film reels buried in a former gold rush town in the Yukon. In showing us clips of these lost movies, all about 100 years old, Morrison also tells the story of Dawson City, a boom town alive with want and opportunity, the locus of a human surge that was at once prodigious and ruinous. Zooming even further out, Dawson City: Frozen Time talks keenly—if not directly—about what it is to be people among one another, to strive for success in collaboration and competition, to seek out shared entertainment and diversion from the lonely harshness of life in the world. Basically, Morrison’s film captures the human experience through images of humans captured on film a century ago. It’s a lyrical movie, a mesmerizing glimpse into the past. There’s also something scary about Dawson City: Frozen Time, in all its reminding that the scramble and noise of our times—as advanced and busy as any have ever been—will one day disappear into their own kind of silence. Overlooked upon its release (by myself included), Dawson City: Frozen Time deserves an unearthing." - Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

"an instantaneously recognizable masterpiece"
- Glenn Kenny, New York Times

• Vanity Fair's Best Films of the 2010s (#3)

• 100% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes with over 50 critics' reviews

• Best Documentary
Boston Society of Film Critics, 2017

• Most Innovative Documentary
Critics' Choice Documentary Awards, 2017

• Best Feature Length Film, Noves Visions Plus
50th Sitges Film Festival 2017

• Extraordinary Achievement
Dublin Film Critics Circle, Audi DIFF, 2018

• Best Editing
International Documentary Association, 2017

• Best Use of Footage in an Arts Production
• Most Inspiring Use of Archive
FOCAL International, London, 2018

Listed as one of the best films of the year by more than 100 critics worldwide, including:
Associated Press, Boston Globe, CBS News, Film Comment, The Film Stage, Hollywood Reporter, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, The New Yorker, Rotten Tomatoes, Senses of Cinema, Sight & Sound, Slant, Village Voice, and Washington Post.