Films by Peter Mettler
BECOMING ANIMAL
a film by Emma Davie & Peter Mettler
Switzerland/UK / 2018 / 78 minutes
An inspired collaboration between filmmakers Emma Davie and Peter Mettler with the environmental philosopher David Abram, Becoming Animal is a different kind of nature film, tracing how we sense the 'more than human' world and exploring how it also senses us.
THE END OF TIME
Switzerland/Canada / 2012 / 110 minutes
Working at the limits of what can easily be expressed, filmmaker Peter Mettler takes on the elusive subject of time, and once again turns his camera to filming the unfilmmable. The End of Time is at once personal, rigorous and visionary – daring to dream the movie of the future while immersing us in the wonder of the everyday.
PETROPOLIS: AERIAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE ALBERTA TAR SANDS
Canada / 2009 / 43 minutes
Shot from a helicopter, Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands offers an unparalleled view of the world's largest industrial, capital and energy project – an extraordinary spectacle whose scope can only be understood from above.
GAMBLING, GODS AND LSD
Canada/Switzerland / 2002 / 180 minutes
A filmmaker’s quest for transcendence becomes a three-hour trip across countries and cultures, between people, over time. Everywhere along the way, the same themes are found: thrill-seeking, luck, destiny, belief, expanding perception, the craving for security in an uncertain world. Fact joins with fantasy; the search for meaning and the search for ecstasy begin to merge.
BALIFILM
Canada/Bali / 1997 / 28 minutes
Diary images and sounds collected in 1990 and 1992 by Peter Mettler on the island of Bali. A personal, lyrical observation and expression of the creative pulse of an extraordinary culture.
PICTURE OF LIGHT
Canada / 1994 / 83 minutes
A mesmerizing tale about a journey to Canada’s arctic in search of one of Earth’s greatest natural wonders: the aurora borealis, or northern lights. Exploring the tension between nature and technology and between science and myth, Picture of Light reveals how our increasingly connected world threatens to render obsolete our individual and authentic experiences.
TECTONIC PLATES
UK/Canada / 1992 / 104 minutes
The image of plate tectonics – the inexorable shifting of the landmasses which support the earth's continents – becomes a metaphor for the evolution of human life and culture, of the forces and restraints that shape the way we think, act and feel.
THE TOP OF HIS HEAD
Canada / 1989 / 110 minutes
From the gifted lens of director-cinematographer Peter Mettler, The Top Of His Head is a genuinely mind-altering experience – an "avant-garde" fairy tale years ahead of its time, whose ultimate subject is nothing less than new ways of seeing. Gus Victor is a satellite dish salesman whose world is turned upside down by a radical and alluring performance artist, leading him on a quest that opens his perceptions.
EASTERN AVENUE
Canada/Switzerland / 1985 / 58 minutes
An exploration of intuition, using film as a kind of audio-visual improvisation formed by the chronology of experiences and perceptions that emerged from a journey to Berlin, Portugal and Switzerland. The resulting work is sensuous, lyrical, and very personal, with a strong kinship to music – a reflection of the movements of the unconscious.
SCISSERE
Canada / 1982 / 83 minutes
A first-person foray into the disorienting realm between reason and sensation, Scissere is an incorrigibly inventive first feature film that deploys a seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of optical effects in rendering the experiences of a mental patient wandering outside institutional confines for the first time in many years.