What an incredible historical and cultural find! The story is engaging and the footage is astonishing. My only qualms with the film was the music - There was very little dialogue so the music carried a solid 85% of the film. Which is fine but it needed to be more cohesive and complimentary and I found myself focusing on it too often.

3 & 1/2 stars. Interesting from the point of cinematic history. Really enjoyed the bits of very old movies. However, the subtitles were tiny & quickly gone which made keeping up impossible. Should have been narration so the viewer could just watch the film.

Absolutely an excellent piece of research, weaving together a narrative that makes able use of the rich archive of films that constitute the Dawson City Find, but as with many documentateries about brief interesting events that can't sustain a feature length it wanders terribly to pad for time. Records of the 1919 World Series and a protracted history of Dawson are barely even related to the film archive, which tries to portray the cinema content in the context of a growing America but just ends up feeling unfocused and often boring. There is very little narration and the narrative is presented through subtitles exclusively, supported by a soundtrack that some call hypnotic but seems more like white noise after a while without interruption, like some sort of screeching whale ghosts. You can tell there was real effort that went into chronicling the backstory, combing images of the town alongside historical records to pin precise events to period visuals and using clips of recovered film for emphasis, but unfortunately the end product is more academic than entertaining. As a lover of film, history, and documentaries independently, I really wanted to like this one, but couldn't find a way to do so beyond technical appreciation. (2.5/5)

A documentary that tries to do just a little too much. The story itself is fascinating â" the discovery in 1978 of a trove of lost silent films preserved in the permafrost of Dawson City, Canada. To me, the â~star of the showâ(TM) in the documentary needs to be the films, and I would have liked the focus to be there, after an introductory explanation of context. Instead, director Bill Morrison rewinds us all the way back through the history of Dawson, from its founding, the Yukon gold rush, and the subsequent changes to the town over the years. He also takes us through various news stories and social movements from the 1910â(TM)s and 1920â(TM)s, as they relate to footage that was discovered. I like history and some of this was interesting to me, and at its best he matches photos to footage (for example, a socialist agitator being deported back to Russia). At its worst he gets into minutiae of Dawsonâ(TM)s history, and instead of just showing some number of the silent films fragments themselves with explanation of the actors, attempts to match footage to what people in the present are talking about. For example, one of the discoverers of the trove says he had to call someone up to come have a look at it, so as heâ(TM)s describing that, we see footage of someone on the phone in an old movie. The background music is awfully eerie and odd in places too. It was interesting enough to watch and a lot of research and care went into the production, so depending on your interests, you may like it better.

1001 movies to see before you die (1203. Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) - Added 2018; Removed 2019). Unlike anything I have ever seen. Haunting and revealing.

great idea, fantastic scope but the overindulgence of the director results in a severe mismatch between the expectations of the audience and the director's end causing many to helplessly flail as the movie persists beyond the one and a half hour mark after which every "new" point of information is a sad ghost of what has already been presented.

Watched some of it. Really cool history, saved from burial! Would love to have a copy of the documentary

An incredible documentary on silent film. A must watch for any film enthusiast or person interested in film history.

Very interesting movie! The creators really went in depth on the history of Dawson City and Silent films in general. The footage found was incredible.

The awards season is an extraordinarily busy time for film critics. With hundreds of films big and small jockeying for our attention, it can be nearly impossible to get to everything. When you're a critic who also has a day job, that task becomes even more daunting. That's why I love year-end Top 10 lists. I follow as many as I can find from every place around the world so I can try to get to anything that deeply touched a fellow critic. I was lucky then to be reading the Film Comment list of the Top 20 movies of 2017 when the title Dawson City: Frozen Time caught my eye. I had seen that the film had been added to FilmStruck, the arthouse streaming service I subscribe to. Since it was one of the few I hadn't seen and it was so available I decided to watch it and I am so glad I did. Dawson City: Frozen Time is one of the most fascinating and exceptional documentaries I have ever seen. https://geeks.media/movie-review-dawson-city-frozen-time?_ga=2.255164616.1126457623.1513947710-953607229.1513947710

Way way too long and way way too arty for the subject matter, which is interesting. Not so interested in this kind of perspective which I found unbearably tedious.

very slow. interesting story. would have appreciated a more upbeat soundtrack! I fell asleep several times early on and therefore missed a lot of information that was merely printed onscreen.

This is a masterpiece. In the format of an avant-garde homage to silent film, it tells the story of Dawson City, a gold rush town from the Klondike days and a grand cache of old movies that were buried there a long time ago. Numerous celebrities passed through this speck of a boomtown in upper upper Canada in one crazy coincidence after another but the real highlight here is the way the movie explains why silent films were so short-lived and combustible that few of them remain to be enjoyed today and how this bitty town ended up with a massive collection of them entombed under an old theater which were dug up and spirited off to libraries as, in some cases, the only remaining copies. Beautiful music, nostalgic presentation, and amazing story.

There is an interesting story in here somewhere. It is NOT a story about the Gold Rush, but rather a story about old movie reels that ended up dumped in a closed swimming pool and later found. It was poorly told at such a sloooow pace. Soundtrack was oppressively creepy. This thing should have been 30 minutes.

Agonizing documentary. If you want to read about Dawson at a 5-year-old's level while listening to obnoxious, depressing screeching violins, this movie is for you!

Fascinating for film & history buffs.

Largo, lento, aburrido y grandioso. Este documental va sobre la historia de la ciudad de Dawson, un pueblo minero, muy importante por la fiebre de oro del Yukón, donde se acababa el mundo a principios del siglo pasado. Hasta allá llegaban las películas de cine mudo, en cintas de nitrocelulosa altamente inflamables, con unos tres años de retraso, pero por ser tan viejas y peligrosas, allá terminaban. La mayoría fueran desechadas al río pero unas cuantas cajas, con cientos de rollos, se salvaron y se han convertido en uno de los patrimonios fílmicos más importantes del cine mudo. El documental es casi mudo y se torna aburrido por lo largo, pero las escenas y fotos rescatadas de la época lo convierten en algo precioso.

This movie documents not only the history of Dawson city in the Yukon, but the history of turn of the century movies that were made with nitrate - a very flammable substance. There is a lot of information. However, I felt that at times the music was too loud and at other times the music was so soothing that I caught myself drifting off. I think the director should have used some of the music music from the turn of the century when displaying the movies. Also, I would like to know how these films are stored today. This is a very good documentary for anyone interested in early film or Dawson City!

Amazing film that is part history of the Yukon development and the Gold Rush and at the same time about a treasure trove of long thought lost silent film saved by being buried in the permafrost. Director Morrison's audacity is that he tells the history of the Yukon and Dawson City by using outtakes from the silents that were discovered buried in Dawson City, employing titles while those films are silent and audible narration once the films are discovered in the talkie era. Thus the viewer gets a glimpse of the films that were salvaged, as well as the types of films that distributors sent to the movie theaters in Dawson City. I'd have loved to have seen more of the initial presentation of the films in Dawson City and at the Film Archives in Ottawa, as well as some discussion about the value of the find, in terms of what it means for both film and North American history, such as the importance of the only film of the disgraced Chicago White Sox and the World Series scandal. Also liked the off the cuff mention of Donald Trump's family (grandfather?) along with the revelation of how many of the 19th and 20th century industrial and commercial giants made a lot of their fortune in the Yukon, or at least tried to. The early parts of the musical score are unnervingly aggravating through what seems like endless repetition, but does improve with a tad more variety in the latter parts of the film.It also seems obvious that Morrison has held back on certain incidents or history that may have upset his story.

I cannot think of a WORSE way to tell what is objectively a very interesting story. We're all there to see these films that were buried for decades, right? So why spend all this time going into the history of every single person and thing related to this rando gold rush town? No narrative arc, totally unfocused, the whole thing was just a litany of a bunch of names and places and years that were only mentioned in passing, so that I was never invested in any of them.... by the end of it, I got the sense that even the director didn't know what his movie was about. Pick one thing, dude! There's no narrator, just two hours of text on screen that we are forced to read, paired with hyperemotional music that NEVER LETS UP, the SAME FOUR CHORDS on repeat the ENTIRE way through... News flash! Audiences do NOT like to be told what to feel!!! The overly saccharine sentimentality of the music made me ready to KILL someone by the end of the film! I would have rather watched it in SILENCE!!! Only reason I didn't leave early is I felt bad walking over everyone next to me in the row. I am sorry, but these critics giving positive reviews are CRACKED OUT!