Eastern Avenue + Petropolis

Peter Mettler in person on November 12!

A travel diary film, Eastern Avenue collects Mettler’s impressions of Switzerland, Berlin and Portugal, shot during the spring of 1983. Organized more or less chronologically, it’s a film of small details, fleeting associations and brief epiphanies, a record of what it’s like to find yourself in a place, and a state of mind, where every change in the weather and every unfamiliar sight registers with special clarity. The film will be preceded by Petropolis, which takes a sweeping view—shot from a moving helicopter—of Canada’s sprawling, unpopulated Alberta tar sands in 2009: vast swaths of empty space cut through by oil flows and neighbored by a massive industrial center-slash-oil refinery. It portrays the close, fragile bonds between people and the natural world.