Watch the First Trailer for Peter Mettler's TIFF Bound While the Green Grass Grows

“I let life make this film,” says Peter Mettler in the trailer for While the Green Grass Grows: A Diary in Seven Parts. “I followed the water. I followed the seasons. I followed the flow. It showed me something.”

POV is pleased to debut the trailer for Mettler’s latest opus, While the Green Grass Grows: A Diary in Seven Parts, along with the film’s poster. This years in the making documentary, which was recently announced to have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, offers a personal rumination on life, love, and the energy cycles of the Earth from one of Canada’s most acclaimed filmmakers. The seven-hour odyssey expands upon an earlier work of the same name that won the top prize for Canadian cinema at RIDM 2023.

While the Green Grass Grows is produced by Mettler with Cornelia Seitler and Brigitte Hofer. Mettler serves as cinematographer, and as film editor with Jordan Kawai. The doc marks his return to TIFF after 2012’s The End of Time, which was later selected for Canada’s Top Ten.

Synopsis: A rapturous chronicle of the miracles contained in everyday things and occurrences, this most ambitious work from award-winning filmmaker Peter Mettler (Gambling, Gods and LSD, Picture of Light) elevates the diary into the realm of visionary cinema. His meditative approach and ever-searching gaze create a generous space to expose and embrace the fragility and profound nature of relationships, where reflections on the human condition and our environment flow together in a stream of consciousness.

Alternately tragic and comic, philosophical and poetic, Mettler’s ebullient diary combines personal conversations, family history, memoir, homage, and love, while its aesthetic is laced with dazzling psychedelic and experimental imagery and sounds that enhance its trance-like feel. While the Green Grass Grows: A Diary in Seven Parts is work of maturity, rigour, and startling intimacy that interrogates our collective destiny with grace and wonder.

TIFF runs Sept. 4 to 14.

Subscribe today to read more about While the Green Grass Grows in issue 124.