Director/cameraman/voice-over text: Peter Mettler – Executive producer: Andreas Zuest Produced by: Grimthorpe Film and Alexandra Gill, Peter Mettler with creative assistance from Ingrid Veninger and Mike Munn – Diary by: Susan Tolusso

Early 1990: Peter Mettler, who is a first-generation Canadian of Swiss-Canadian parentage, attends a dinner party in Zurich. There he meets a meteorologist/artist, a man who’s been a longtime fan of the Northern Lights and always wanted to photograph them. This is difficult in Switzerland because the Lights are not often visible there.

This gentleman, who had worked as a meteorologist in the Canadian Arctic and had tried to photograph and film the Lights there, is aware of Mettler as a filmmaker (The Top of his Head) and cinematographer and raises with Mettler the idea of a film featuring the Lights.

Mettler talks the idea over with Andreas Zuest in Zurich. Zuest pledges to get the money together for the film that will become Picture of Light, a feature-length narrative documentary inspired by the Lights and relaying the trials, tribulations and discoveries the crew made while trying to capture this natural wonder on celluloid.

Eventually, of the SFr 650,000 budget, Zuest will raise SFr 300,000 privately, and receive a total of SFr 250,000 from donors. The balance of SFr 100,000 is accounted for in deferrals of equipment and salaries.

December 1990: Mettler and Zuest meet in Zurich. Zuest has assembled enough money – from a German artist wishing to remain anonymous – to allow the film to begin the first phase of production.

December 1990 to February 1991: The producers do, as Alex Gill says, ‘an incredible amount of research into the Northern Lights,’ including finding as much previous footage of them as possible and determining how to survive in the cold while getting what they need for their film.

To begin, there is the issue of how to clothe the crew in 40 below weather, how to keep them warm during all-night watches with the camera on the Arctic tundra.

While none of the research or planning for the cold-weather shoot ends up in the film, some of the shoot goes in, Gill says, because it was such a difficult task. The camera was set up on the snow-covered tundra in the pitch dark. The lens would freeze and frost over within seconds, the aperture and tripod would freeze, the viewfinder would freeze and frost over, the power chords would freeze and snap and the batteries would expend their whole power lives in seconds.

February 1991: The crew heads north from Toronto to Churchill, Man., a train trip which takes three days from Winnipeg. Churchill is considered an ideal site because, although ‘bloody cold,’ the Lights can be seen 300 nights of the year.

On this first visit, they spend two weeks in Churchill and, thanks to an accident that causes the camera to fail, capture only 12 seconds of Northern Lights footage on film. They do manage to conduct some interviews with Churchillians about their proximity to this beautiful phenomenon and about living at the base of the Arctic Circle.

February 1991 to February 1992: Because the optimal time to shoot the Lights is when the moon is not too bright, and because Mettler and company are working on another feature, Tectonic Plates, a year passes before the crew can again head north to Churchill.

This time, Zuest brings a cheese-making acquaintance (off duty) along to share the experience. Again, the excursion is financed by artists, this time from Switzerland.

Better success this time on the shooting, over a two-and-a-half to three-week stay. Says Gill: ‘We came back with perhaps some of the best footage of the Northern Lights that exists in the world.’

Toronto cinematographer Gerald Packer mans the all-night, every night shoots, during which time the camera – hooked up to an intervalometer designed by Charles Bagnall of Toronto – shoots one frame at a time for five- to 20-second exposures, depending on the intensity of the Lights. While the intervalometer means the camera essentially runs itself, Packer stands by to adjust exposure times in accordance with the Lights’ brightness. The camera, wrapped in a battery warmer and spurred on by the intervalometer, also wrapped and stuffed into an empty cooler, captures two to three minutes’ of ‘amazing’ footage each night.

By day, the crew interviews more locals, such as a dogsledder and Inuit hunters, about their lives beneath the Lights. Later, Gill and her colleagues would reflect on the Churchillians, surrounded by natural beauty but living through a man-made technological advance, aka tv. She says in many of their homes, the tv goes on first thing and stays on till bedtime.

Shooting complete, the team returns to Toronto to work on Tectonic Plates.

Fall 1992 to January 1994: Given the European financing, and the crew’s desire to work at a well-known Swiss lab, they post in Switzerland. They move into a remote farmhouse in a canton near the borders of Germany and Austria.

As they arrive with Steenbecks and other equipment, they cause a stir among locals because in this area, women have only recently been given the vote.

There is no script, so Gill says the editing process (picture edit by Mettler and Munn, sound by Mettler and Gill) is lengthened by the need to ‘write’ the film as they go along. Mettler composes the voice-over text.

The heart of the film, Gill discovers, grows out of the explanations it offers for why they made the trek to shoot the Lights, to freeze their ‘butts off’ in the cold, to marvel at the people of Churchill.

Shot on Super 16 and 35mm, the Super 16 stock must be blown up to 35mm and for this, and to execute the optical effects, they head to the lab.

The music sound track is composed by Jim O’Rourke of Chicago. Gill says the producers first came across one of his cds in an alternative music store in Switzerland.

January to February 1994: Picture of Light is finished. Gill says she worked on it for three years, seven days a week, 18 hours per day. The film, now with a life of its own, goes to a film festival in Rotterdam, to ‘amazing response.’ Accordingly, they take it to the market at Berlin in February, self-distributing all the while. They continue to seek a sales agent or distributor.

June 1994: Picture of Light goes to the Sydney Film Festival

August 1994: Off to Locarno, Switzerland for its festival, out of official competition. Nevertheless, it wins SFr 25,000 for best film from Switzerland or international coproduction. It also wins La Sarraz prize in La semaine de la critique.

September to October 1994: North American debut at Toronto International Film Festival, Sept. 11. By month’s end, it’s off to New York’s Independent Feature Film market. In October, it will go to the Vancouver International Film Festival, then back to Europe’s festival circuit, then back to the u.s.