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A Gold Rush town brought to haunting life in the mesmerizing 'Frozen Time'

I first saw Dawson City: Frozen Time at the 2016 Venice Film Festival. Afterward I left the theater in a sort of trance, mesmerized by what I had witnessed.

I first saw Dawson City: Frozen Time at the 2016 Venice Film Festival. Afterward I left the theater in a sort of trance, mesmerized by what I had witnessed. As I wrote at the time, "Bill Morrison's Dawson City: Frozen Time  is unlike anything I've seen before, a poetic film essay about the fragility of silent film, told through the prism of the Yukon gold rush. Nitrate film, formerly the industry standard, is highly flammable stuff (see Cinema Paradiso). It's been known to spontaneously combust, taking film archives, buildings and human lives with it. But not when it's accidentally buried under a building in Alaska and put on ice, only to be fortuitously discovered decades later. Dawson City gains added resonance from its powerhouse score by Sigur Rós collaborator Alex Somers, but it's the sequencing of the images, brought back to frayed, glorious life, that casts the real spell."

The good news is that Dawson City will play in Dallas 9 p.m. Nov. 2 at the Angelika Dallas. It's part of Dallas VideoFest's Alternative Fiction series. For more information on the film and the series, visit videofest.org.