By José Teodoro
Expected Shipping Date: October 15, 2025
In the cosmology of Canadian cinema, Peter Mettler is our seeker. From his early experimental narrative feature, Scissere, to his inventive adaptation of Robert Lepage’s Tectonic Plates, from his sprawling, Genie Award-winning essay film, Gambling, Gods and LSD, to his god’s-eye survey of the Alberta tar sands, Petropolis, Mettler has maintained a constant forge into the terra incognita of the transcendental. Applying equal rigour to preparation and improvisation, Mettler’s peripatetic lens is ever gravitating toward outsiders in search of ecstatic states, strange spectacles that defy straightforward documentation, and sacred places that promise some metaphysical deliverance. With the release of the auteur’s latest and most ambitious film, While the Green Grass Grows: A Diary in Seven Parts, there has never been a better time to discover Mettler’s singular body of work.
The product of eleven years of conversations with playwright and author José Teodoro, undertaken in various locations in Mettler’s two home countries of Canada and Switzerland, Nothing But Time explores this extraordinary artist’s life and practice, which brims with tales of uncanny coincidence, dynamic collaborations with fellow artists such as Atom Egoyan, Jennifer Baichwal, and Jim O’Rourke, and countless encounters with visionaries from the worlds of science and spirituality. In Mettler’s story, the yearning for knowledge is balanced with the surrender to boundless mystery, until the tenets that guide his art and life dissolve and cohere in an uncommon commitment to cultivating our collective sense of wonder.
Praise for Nothing But Time:
“An extraordinary, luminous book made in creative collaboration with one of the most important filmmakers working today. Peter Mettler has created an essential body of work, exploring the intractable ingredients of cinema itself. His total physical output consists of some 24 hours of film. Through these deep and far-reaching conversations with José Teodoro, this single day is expanded into months, years, and several decades. Perhaps through to the end of time itself. A unique cinematic/literary achievement, combining the two forms with a fascinatingly harnessed alchemy.”
— Atom Egoyan, Academy Award-nominated director of The Sweet Hereafter
José Teodoro is a writer and director. His literary prose has appeared in Brick, Geist, The Fiddlehead, and subTerrain. His writing on film has appeared in Film Comment, Cinema Scope, and other publications. His performance works include Island, winner of the 2024 Lee Prize For New Canadian Plays, and Screen Door, which was adapted for audio by Applied Silence, José’s group with musician-composer Stephen Lyons, and is available via Offseason Records. joseteodoro.com
