WHILE THE GREEN GRASS GROWS : A Diary in Seven Parts
a new PROJECT by Peter Mettler / Canada/Switzerland / in progress
Trailer | While the Green Grass Grows | Peter Mettler
“The grass is always greener on the other side.” This well-known expression constitutes the inspiration for a plurality of movements. The cyclical movement of a torrent in Appenzell, Switzerland, whose waters swell when the snow begins to melt; the movement that drove Julie and Freddy, Peter Mettler's parents, to leave their native Switzerland for Ontario; or that of a free-form film. "How will you prepare if you haven’t planned anything?" exclaims Mara, a neighbour. While the Green Grass Grows will be an extraordinary 12-hour long film, divided into seven parts, begun in 2019. In the form of an audiovisual diary, it takes us through the events of recent years, marked by the global pandemic but especially the deaths of the filmmaker's mother, then father, which provide the fuel for these two chapters screened together. A work of maturity, and probably the director’s most intimate film to date, which interrogates our universal human destiny with grace and generosity. - Emmanuel Chicon
"…Bestows a kind of immortality on the dead, allowing Mettler to contemplate what happens to us after we physically die. Is there a faith in something more?” - Allan Hunter, Screendaily
“At times tragic or comedic, philosophical or poetic, the diary is laced with psychedelic and experimental imagery that enhance its trance-like feel, underlined by an immersive, steady sound design” - Lise Pedersen, Variety
“It is meditative, in the sense of both calming and clearing the mind. It is about letting go and letting life lead you.” - Geoffrey Macnab, Business Doc Euorpa
“Mettler films as if he’s composing. As he does so, tuning into the frequency of the people, the nature and the animals he encounters, the director makes deep connections with everything around him. The time he devotes to this, and his dedication to penetrating beneath the surface of things to the point of abstraction, turns While the Green Grass Grows into a visual meditation.” - Giorgia Del Don, Cineuropa
“«Gesamtkunstwerk» is a term typically associated with Richard Wagner’s operas, in which words, pictures, music, and philosophy combine into a perfect synergy of oneness. It’s also an appropriate word to characterize Mettler’s work. This filmmaker is a born artist, a poet, and philosopher, a composer of light, image, and sound.“ - Margareta Hruza, Modern Times Review
CREDITS
WORLD PREMIERE (PARTS 1&6): April 2023
ORIGINAL VERSION: English, colour, DCP, 166 min.
ISAN: 0000-0006-E5DB-0000-2-0000-0000-V
PRODUCTION: maximage, Grimthorpe Film Inc.
PRODUCER: Cornelia Seitler, Peter Mettler, Brigitte Hofer
DIRECTED BY: Peter Mettler
WRITTEN BY: Peter Mettler
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Peter Mettler
EDITING: Jordan Kawai, Peter Mettler
LOCATION SOUND MIX: Peter Mettler
SOUND DESIGN: Jordan Kawai, Peter Bräker
RE-RECORDING MIX: Jacques Kieffer
PETER METTLER BIO
STILLS DOWNLOAD
POSTER
AWARDS
Nyon, Visions du Réel - Festival international de cinéma, Grand Prix (Compétition Internationale Longs Métrages) 2023 (Winner)
Leipzig, Internationales Leipziger Festival für Dokumentar - und Animationsfilm, Die Goldene Taube 2023 (Winner)
Montreal, RIDM Rencontres internationales du documentaire Montréal, Grand Prix National 2023 (Winner)
FESTIVALS
While the Green Grass Grows (Parts 1&6)
2024
Sydney, Antenna Documentary Film Festival
Copenhagen, CPH:DOX
Montevideo, Cinemateca Uruguaya
Zagreb, ZagrebDox
Bozen, Bolzano Film Festival
Jeonju, Jeonju International Film Festival
Vancouver, Doxa Documentary Film Festival
Madrid, Documenta Madrid
Warsaw, Millennium Docs Against Gravity
Birmingham, Flatpack Film Festival
2023
Nyon, 29e Visions du Réel Festival international de cinéma Nyon
Leipzig, 66. DOK Leipzig - Internationales Festival für Dokumentar- und Animationsfilm
Jihlava, 27th Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival
Dharamshala, Dharamshala International Film Festival
Amsterdam, 36th IDFA International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam
Montreal, 26e RIDM Rencontres internationales du documentaire Montréal
Porto, 10° Porto Post Doc Film & Media Festival
CONTACT
Maximage
Neugasse 6
CH – 8005 Zürich
info@maximage.ch
CONNECT
instagram.com/petermettlerfilm
facebook.com/GrimthorpeFilm
twitter.com/GrimthorpeFilm
vimeo.com/grimthorpefilm
AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER METTLER
MG: Your latest documentary film, While the Green Grass Grows, Parts 1 and 6, is the first installment of a seven-part oeuvre. What was the initial idea behind the project?
PM: When I started the project, I wanted to proceed in a kind of daisy-chain fashion, with each element developing from the one before. And I thought that the expression “the grass is always greener on the other side” would be a good prompt to engage people about their desires, that would lead me from one person’s wish to the next and the next. I believe, in this way, that you can discover valuable things that can’t be imagined or researched ahead of time and it results in a work that reflects the nature of life’s unfolding experience. I did pitches and so on for a couple of years, but it didn't come to anything because it was hard to get support without a traditional script. I was lucky to be given some money privately to get started – and this handover of cash is actually one of the first scenes in the film. It was 2019 and I thought, well, I must start now: right here in Appenzellerland, looking out this window where we're sitting. I started to follow the water running off the hills into the Rhine Valley below.
MG: And where did things go from there?
PM: I followed the path of least resistance, that led me initially to my neighbour Gass, a tattoo master, who led me to a huge cave complex, and then spending time with my father, Freddy, and more broadly over the years, a trip across the USA because I was invited to show a film in a town called Truth or Consequences, and Cuba, where I was engaged with a bunch of other filmmakers, teaching for a month. It became very diaristic. I worked mostly alone, sometimes recruiting help along the way. When I went back to Toronto after Cuba, Covid started kicking in. Shortly thereafter my father became ill and that became a dominant part of what I was filming. The “greener grass” theme never went away, but it’s woven through the whole unfolding experience. In 2021 I had my own brush with mortality that I also documented in some funny ways.
MG: It seems that the emphasis shifted along the way from the literal meaning of “the grass is greener” – which usually suggests being dissatisfied or longing for something different – to the idea of “the other side” in the sense of the afterlife, and notions of nature and seasons and rebirth.
PM: That’s why I love the expression - because it can be interpreted in so many ways. It addresses something central in the human condition that could be framed as our desire for something better. But if you talk to a scientist, it's about research and exploration. It's actually part of our evolution. Change is an essential part of forward momentum.
And as you say, parts One and Six are focused on mortality. The reason my editor Jordan Kawai and I put those two parts together to release now is because they include a particular narrative that witnesses the time I spent with my father and mother at the end of their lives, with observations on the cycles of nature, alongside universal questions about a possible afterlife.
MG: So the parts are numbered chronologically in the order you shot them, but are being released in a different order?
PM: Well, the whole project has been guided by: “How can we continue to move forward?” How am I going to dance with the unfolding experience of life as a filmmaker, filming it as it's happening? And this approach has extended into the presentation of the work itself. My producer Cornelia Seitler and I had initially chosen Parts One and Six to present at Visions du Réel in Nyon, but in a financing context, to show some work in progress. And then the festival director Emilie Bujès saw it and suggested we finish those parts and show them in competition. So we kind of did it on a dare. And then we won the Grand Jury Prize, which we had not expected.
The chronology is really important to the whole project. In the editing, sequences don’t get rearranged. Part of the logic of the series is that it does reflect the real unfolding of my experience. We humans don't live neat narrative lines. We live complicated multi-narrative lines. And narratives are things that we make up out of what might seem like chaos in order to give us meaning. It’s another survival tactic.
But everything does happen for a reason and that is absolutely influenced by what has come before. I find this logic exciting to follow. In this case I don’t want to impose a false intellectualized human narrative on top of experience. I’d rather wish to observe the connections, associations and epiphanies together with the audience, where each person may have a personal experience and may glean their own subjective meaning. Watching these films is like going on a trip, being led down sensory pathways of sound and image, meeting people, hearing ideas and learning a few things along the way. A meditation of sorts. Ideally all parts will be watched in chronological sequence - but we are editing the parts so that each episode can stand alone.
MG: You say in the film that you have a kind of love-hate relationship with filming. I think a lot of people wonder how you create the kind of intense focus and boosting of perception that your films are known for. What happens for you, when you turn on the camera and go into the world?
PM: The medium helps sharpen my bodily senses, helps me see more deeply and appreciate the interrelationships of things, the beauty and poignancy of things. But the paradox is that you may be showing a film where you're asking people to feel more connected to nature, yet you're doing it with technology, and you're sitting in a dark room with projected imagery, and the experience is bizarrely cerebral and not engaging the senses as it would if you were in that natural environment. I guess I'm always challenged by this. On the other hand, it's an amazing medium that can take you into great unconventional realms of perception and understanding.
MG: There’s a moment in the film where you reveal a clip from the first short film you ever made, and you reference the idea that one keeps making the same film over and over.
PM: I think that when we create, we may cycle the same ideas over and over throughout our life, they take on new dimensions with each circling – really more like spiralling. It’s an evolution with repetitive cycles. Life is full of that. Occasionally in the soundtrack you will faintly hear Ravel’s Bolero play, which to me is a kind of acoustic demonstration of cyclical life and thought. And it was a piece of music I had stuck in my head for far too long (laughs).
MG: But this diary is a departure for you in some ways. You work more with voiceover, you’re more personally present in the film, interacting with people. And you also use footage shot by other people, including archival footage.
PM: The voice is not only mine. There are other people quoted throughout: Thich Nhat Hanh, Kurt Vonnegut, friends and people met along the way... Picture of Light or Gambling, Gods and LSD were structured more like essays whereas my intention here was not to be an auteur, but rather a kind of medium that all these ideas of culture would come through. Ideas are not really our own – they are generated by all of us collectively. Sometimes you hear my part of the conversation with a protagonist.
As for the archival footage: I have used that before in my films, like the NASA footage in The End of Time. But at this point, at my age, I also have my own old footage, including the Super-8 film that I made when I was 16. When I was cleaning out my basement during Covid, I started to go through old celluloid material. The images I found of my parents, when they were younger than I am now, or a film I shot about reincarnation in India in the 80’s, kind of replaces my own physical memory. And those images of World War Two we see when my dad is talking about his childhood memories - that's what exists for us to remember collectively. So the idea of recorded film images as memory became a theme. Film is like a time machine - something made in the past to be looked at in the future. It takes you back. It's very powerful.
MG: Sound is also a very important aspect of your work, including aural collages based on ambient noises mixed with music. Could you talk about how you create the soundtracks for your films?
PM: Sound is so suggestive and enriching to the image. Even when we're in the rough-cut stage, we're editing sound and image and voice all together as an entity, because I feel that they're influencing each other so much. In this case, Jordan Kawai my editor, adopted my approach to things and did a lot of beautiful work in the assembly stage, before we worked together towards the fine cut. It's a constant process of shaping and balancing in a compositional sense.
MG: You also have a dance interlude in the film, as a tribute to your mother. It's a little quirky moment, which I think is important to mention, because the film’s themes sound very serious but it’s also full of funny, charming, touching elements.
PM: It's a little light moment that comes after we spread some of her ashes into a river and I talk about the pathways of water going up into the clouds. It’s a callback to the beginning of the film, where she talks about looking forward to dancing again – “somewhere”. I like humor and levity, and it's definitely a tricky balance when you're dealing with the theme of mortality. It was one of the main things I was attentive towards, especially when it came to filming my father’s death. But both my parents, Julie and Freddy are very lovable. Over the years of me filming, they learned how to ham it up on camera very well.
MG: Grief and comfort is a theme that comes up in multiple contexts in the film. Also in relation to the Covid crisis, and to your friend Alex, who talks about dying being a kind of labour – like birth. Do you think about going up against a boundary there, by filming your father’s passing?
PM: That was one of the biggest questions: whether I should share glimpses into this intimate process of dying, or not. During the course of the editing, I showed cuts to a number of people with that question. Was there something constructive here to show that went beyond the personal? The reply was a pretty resounding “yes”.
I spent 9 days with him, as I mentioned in the VO, reading to him and comforting him and just being there. It turned into a profound experience, as it does I'm sure, for many people. The film is a personal story and a
universal story at the same time. In the hospital, while my dad was in his last days, I saw a pregnant woman coming in, ready to give birth. It made me realize the obvious bookends of a life. They're both absolutely important. That sort of cheered me up. I guess in a way it put things into perspective and made it more of a celebration, oddly.
The continued work on the project has been part of a grieving process combined with a kind of engaged awareness around my being a living breathing organism. It all happened between 2019 and 2021, and my dad died in the middle of that, and my mom died just before that.
MG: What effect did the pandemic have on the project?
PM: My intention with this project was to react to things as they were unfolding, and to observe and make associations along the way. So when Covid came along, Covid became a big part of what I filmed. I think maybe the most profound thing - and I think this was the case for many people - was the attention to nature. The diminished number of cars and airplanes, the downtime, the ability to go walk through forests in the spring to see the buds, and become more aware of the cycles of birth and death in the seasons, in the forest.. all those were things that I picked up. Certain conversations came about because we were outside walking and we were in this new forced awareness that slowed our lives down a bit. So I think Covid brought a lot of good things along with it, also towards the awareness of interrelationship of things. The virus started in one place and look how it spread. It’s yet another demonstration of how everything is part of everything else. That’s also an ecological point of view that's very important, but is often ignored: how does one thing affect the next?
MG: Do you consider yourself part of the Slow Cinema movement?
PM: Cinema that is slow moving can act as a threshold that brings us into something quite enlightening – a new sense of time and observation. It works differently in a cinema where you can't be distracted and go check your email or whatever. You're locked into this experience. I want to invite people into another sense of time where they don’t actually know how much time has passed and there are not the usual plot cues that we most often experience in story structure. But I don't think I'm that extreme where slow is concerned. And sometimes things also move very fast.
There are moments of slow cinema, but my cinema takes on all kinds of forms which are mostly influenced by the characteristics of the real world situation. There are some sequences that involve my live performances, which is like another language of cinema – one that mixes layers of images like a collage or a sound mix. It's another way to compose and relay information. There are passages that are poetic, or hallucinatory, and others that are like cinema verité. There are places I use slowness where I think it's the right way to experience a sense of presence – to feel a particular environment or character.
Mostly I wish to encourage one to look and to listen and to explore with compassion. Observation that leads to an appreciation for the inter-relationship of things to each other through the simple unfolding of life experience itself. In this case it is my own diary of visions, encounters and ideas.
Interview by Marcy Goldberg, Appenzellerland, November 2023
UPDATE: TORONTO 2023 - SEASON ONE NEARING COMPLETION!
Since 2019 nothing happened quite as expected. Peter was given a handful of cash to start filming directly out his window, then following the things that crossed his path as he went about his travels and obligations. Initially this began in rural Appenzell Switzerland, tracking the melting waters of spring up the mountains accompanied at times by his neighbors like Gass, a tattoo master, or Maria, a gardener of dead and living things.
When Peter’s mother, Julia, passed away, it became important to spend time with his father Freddy, and the While The Green Grass Grows series abruptly became a personal diary of lives lived and lost amidst the unique circumstances of a global pandemic. Observing the world, unfolding as it may, became the focus of documentation and poetic expression.
Currently running 12 hours, divided into 7 parts, the series leads us from high up in the mountains, to conversations about other-than-human life with anthropologist Jeremy Narby in the forests of Manitoba, Canada, to the last days of Freddy's good long life in Killarney Park, Ontario. Next, follows a road trip across America to a town named after a game show, set amidst a desert of ancient habitations and colourful characters on the edge of an iffy future.
At times the form is verite´ and at times pure music and visual joy, the cues being taken by the subjects and subject matters themselves.
Next, a month long sojourn at the infamous Cuban film school, founded by Castro himself, interacting with a group of filmmakers and island inhabitants, is then followed by the beginning of Covid isolation back in Ontario and Appenzell. People die while natural cycles bloom and our experience of reality becomes smaller and abstract, thinly connected to the real by threads of technology.
All the while the themes of our While The Green Grass Grows project continue to surface in unexpected ways. The exploratory and often improvised process of its making reveals a remarkable network of associations as the plots of everyday life and people thicken and twist.
Ultimately, surprisingly, Peter himself is dislodged in an unexpected way into a domain of experience, perception and filmmaking that he has never before encountered.
Together with Jordan Kawai they have been tirelessly editing and composing the material of three years experience into a cinematic adventure, currently now back in the world looking for completion funds and the ideal platform on which to release this unique project.
For further info please contact producer Maximage at info@maximage.ch.
CPH DOX 2019 PITCH AND TEASER
"The grass is always greener on the other side" suggests both our better nature and our darker impulses.
Inspired by a chain of characters seeking ever-greater horizons, we plunge into a flow of human yearning and aspiration.
What is this human desire to want more? Why do we always strive and need? And what does the striving, wanting, needing have to do with the conditions that we live in, our desire to conquer, our capacity for dreaming, creation and invention – or our inevitable death? These questions are the foundation for a project that will culminate in a six-part TV and web series which connects the lives of disparate characters into an exploration of human yearning and aspiration.
"The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence" is a proverb we rarely consider deeply. But a version of it exists in languages and cultures all around the world, testifying to the universality of the principle it expresses.
The proverb describes several fundamentals aspects of Nature: nourishment, growth and survival. As powerful as these drives are, they can also be equally destructive. “The grass is always greener” suggests both our better nature and our darker impulses. We are highly social creatures, but also susceptible to envy, greed, and blindness to what we already have.
The series mechanism of While The Green Grass Grows is simple: a daisy-chain. Each episode will explore the particular world and characteristics of two intriguing individuals. During each portrait, we will ask the subjects, “What other life would you like to live?” Or, “Where would you like to be?” Or, “What does ‘the grass is always greener’ suggest to you?”
If they describe a wish to know what it is like to be an African hunter-gatherer living in a society without violence, an astrophysicist exploring interstellar space, a Buddhist monk meditating in a mountain cave, even a member of the opposite sex, or (in the case of Peter Mettler’s 90 year-old mother) a California surfer, we will travel to visit that surfer or monk, explore their life, and ask them the same questions, continuing onwards in a spiraling progression. As this chain of interaction grows, an associative network evoking the human condition will begin to emerge.
Currently in development, we are establishing themes, teams, strategies and possible trajectories. The production will be strategized but not scripted. It will be shot in cinema verité style, catching people’s lives as they unfold, graced with insightful observation and deft, poetic qualities.
It is our goal that this chain of yearning and aspiration will generate an awareness of human commonality. The question – “is the grass really greener on the other side?” – will never be far from the viewer’s mind, along with the possibility that while dreams power the human imagination, we also flourish when we open our eyes to the present moment.