While the Green Grass Grows

Peter Mettler / Switzerland, Canada / 2023 / Czech Premiere / 166 min.

synopsis

The grass is always greener on the other side, and for now he’d like to watch it grow. The paradox of the transience of life is most clearly reflected in the moments when it fades away. Julie and Freddy, the director's parents, are slowly leaving this world, and their son decides to capture this painful moment on camera. The result is a documentary created using the associative method, composing stimuli in a single line as they unfold in the director's perception. In a cascade similar to the rivers flowing from Swiss mountain peaks and rolling down to the ocean, Julie and Freddy also headed from Europe to Canada many decades ago in search of a new life, which is now coming to an end.

“From the beginning of my own filmmaking, I have never seen cinema as just an illustrative tool, but also as a medium that allows us to go inside the head – directly into a state of perception that can be engaged or changed in a myriad of ways.” — Peter Mettler

Source: porto/post/doc

biography

Peter Mettler (1958) is a Swiss-Canadian cinematographer, director and multimedia artist, known for his work with Atom Egoyan, Robert Lepage and Neil Young. We have already had the opportunity to see his films The End of Time (2012) and Becoming Animal (2018) in Jihlava.

more about film

director:	Peter Mettler
producer:	Cornelia Seitler, Peter Mettler, Brigitte Hofer
script:	Peter Mettler
photography:	Peter Mettler
editing:	Jordan Kawai, Peter Mettler
sound design:	Jordan Kawai