While the Green Grass Grows (UK Premiere)

“You can make up the future. If you can’t see it, make it up and believe in it.” – Julie Mettler

Every ten years or so, director and cinematographer Peter Mettler gives us a freewheeling essay film on a cosmic topic: the aurora borealis (Picture of Light); the search for happiness (Gambling Gods and LSD); the nature of time (The End of Time). Now he’s turned his lens inwards, with a project bookended by the deaths of his mother Julie and his father Freddy.

In some ways it’s his smallest, most intimate film, yet it’s also huge: this is just two chapters of what will eventually become a seven-part, twelve-hour film diary.

Mettler’s experience of grief opens out into a riff on our relationship with nature and the cycle of life, swooping from the rivers and caves of the Swiss Alps which his parents left behind as a young couple to the forests of their adopted home Canada. Along the way we encounter a global pandemic, and brief glimpses of what this planet might look like without humans.

Throughout we have the sense of a filmmaker using camera and editing to work out his thoughts and feelings – a process Mettler describes as his ‘religion’.

Beautiful and tender, While the Green Grass Grows leaves you feeling more connected with the world.