Wandering spirit Peter Mettler gets a welcome career retrospective this October at TIFF Lightbox. In Nothing But Time: The Films of Peter Mettler, curated by José Teodoro, Mettler’s body of work returns to the big screen along with an encore presentation of his latest opus While the Green Grass Grows: A Diary in Seven Parts following its acclaimed premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Mettler will attend screenings and participate in Q&As, including talks with fellow filmmakers like Atom Egoyan. POV has the first look at the trailer for the retrospective ahead of its run October 4 to 26.
Films in the series include Mettler’s Genie Award winner Gambling, Gods and LSD (2002), which makes a surprise cameo in While the Green Grass Grows, and his breakthrough student film Scissere (1982). The retrospective also includes formative works like Eastern Avenue (1985), Top of His Head (1989), and Tectonic Plates (1992), and later works like Petropolis (2009) and The End of Time (2012). Also screening is arguably his most celebrated doc, Picture of Light (1994), a Quixotic quest to capture the aurora borealis in Churchill, Manitoba. The film was named among POV’s 50 docs that defined the first 50 years of TIFF this summer.
The retrospective coincides with the release of the book Nothing But Time by Teodoro, which draws upon 11 years of conversations with Mettler. “In the cosmology of Canadian cinema, Peter Mettler is our seeker,” writes Teodoro in his essay introducing the series. “His peripatetic lens is ever gravitating toward outsiders in search of ecstatic states, spectacles that defy straightforward documentation, and sacred places that promise some metaphysical deliverance…Mettler’s gifts as an open and unobtrusive interviewer and his capacity to discover shared sensibilities between people of vastly diverse cultures and creeds feels singular.”
