Renowned director and cinematographer Peter Mettler profoundly influenced documentary writing in the 2000s.

His hybrid work explores the limits of human perception without any predetermined script and according to an associative process that wanders about along the borders of essay, documentary and fiction.The director will give a masterclass online, while a retrospective will be dedicated to work on dafilms.com as well. All the information regarding these encounters, as well as the arrangements for participation, will be shortly available.

Masterclass

Moderation
Jean Perret (Critique, Essayiste, Professeur)
Emmanuel Chicon (Member of the Selection Committee, Visions du Réel)

Born in Toronto in 1958 to Swiss parents, Peter Mettler studied film at the Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, and became a figure in the Toronto New Wave in the 1980s, by making a noteworthy first experimental feature, Scissere (1982), and as cinematographer for Atom Egoyan, Patricia Rozema and Bruce McDonald, as well as Jennifer Baichwal on Manufactured Landscapes (2006). The hybrid work of the filmmaker explores the limits of human perception without predetermined scripts and according to an associative process that wanders the borders of essay, documentary and fiction. His portfolio includes a trilogy of metaphysical documentary travelogues, consisting of Picture of Light (1994), Gambling, Gods and LSD (2002) and The End of Time (2012), and films haunted by the current environmental crisis such as Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands (2009) and Becoming Animal (2018). A multi-disciplinary creator, Peter Mettler also works as a VJ with artists such as Fred Frith, Biosphere or Jeremy Narby and Franz Treichler. In 2016, he donated his personal archives to the Cinémathèque suisse and to the archives of the Toronto International Film Festival, the largest cinematographical collection in English-speaking Canada.

  • Becoming Animal, 2018
  • Traces du Futur, 2014
  • The End of Time, 2012
  • Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands, 2009
  • Away, 2007
  • Gambling, Gods and LSD, 2002
  • Balifilm, 1997
  • Picture of Light, 1994
  • Tectonic Plates, 1992
  • The Top of His Head, 1989
  • Eastern Avenue, 1985
  • Scissere, 1982
  • Gregory, 1981
  • Lancalot Freely, 1980

Program