The grass is greener in Peter Mettler’s Appenzell

Peter Mettler receives the Grand Prize in the international feature film competition of the Visions du Réel festival with his film “While the Green Grass Grows”, April 28, 2023. KEYSTONE/KEYSTONE/Cyril Zingaro

Swiss-Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler has already received accolades around the world for an epic Swiss documentary that is not yet even finished. He explains to SWI swissinfo.ch why the project feels like a strange homecoming.

Last year, a nearly three-hour Swiss documentary, about the slow death of the filmmaker’s father, nature’s cycles, and a pandemic we all hope to forget, swept a raft of prizes at international documentary festivals and proved a modest hit with audiences around the world. 

First it won at the Visions du Réel festival in Nyon, where it was initially only supposed to be shown in a rough cut to attract potential investors. Then it picked up awards at DOK Leipzig and the Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM). It has since shown at non-fiction festivals in India, Czechia, the Netherlands, Australia, and Portugal – and its travels are only beginning. 

In early 2024, it returned to German-speaking Switzerland, the ancestral home of its maker, for a proper cinema release across the region.

That such a long, meditative movie found success in an attention-sapped world is already a worthy feat. What makes it all the more incredible is that this particular work is not even finished.

What has won awards is, in fact, merely parts one and five of a seven-part epic which spans more than 10 hours: a sprawling project entitled While the Green Grass Grows, since it takes that old aphorism – the grass is always greener on the other side – as a tentative starting point.

Epic transcendentalist 

The filmmaker behind this astonishing project is Peter Mettler, a Canadian multi-disciplinary artist born to Swiss parents. He is known for his feature documentaries that tackle the most lofty themes in the most epic formats: the Northern Lights on 35mm film in Picture of Light (1994), the pursuit of transcendence in the three-hour Gambling, Gods & LSD (2002), the consciousness of animals and their interactions with humans in Becoming Animal (2018, co-directed with Emma Davie), or indeed the nature and passing of time itself in The End of Time (2012).

“Our intention [at Visions du Réel] was to come with a work in progress, something very much unfinished, to try to raise money for the bigger project,” Mettler tells SWI after a full-house screening of While the Green Grass Grows  at the Solothurn Film Festival. The festival is a showcase of Swiss movie production of the last 12 months and took place in January.

“Émilie [Bujès], the festival director, encouraged us to put it into competition. It was kind of a dare: ‘Okay, let’s see if we can finish it and let’s see what happens.’ The whole project has been a bit like that; it’s very unorthodox. We don’t know the course of the film until taking the next step, basically.” 

 The screening in Solothurn capped a multi-week tour with the film through German-speaking Switzerland, including in Appenzell, the region where a good deal of what we see in the two completed sections was shot. The film began after several fruitless years of workshopping and pitching with only the central “green grass” aphorism as the guiding light. The backdrop was the Appenzell region of eastern Switzerland. In 2019, Mettler was given some cash by a friend (we see this handover in the film) and spontaneously decided to start right away. 

Found in translation 

Throughout his career, Mettler has straddled the two countries –Canada and Switzerland – and his dual citizenship and archetypically Swiss multilingualism has been matched by his peripatetic style and willingness to engage vigorously with disparate cultural practices, belief systems, and intellectual traditions in his pursuit of making films. For example, the locations in While the Green Grass Grows – hospital rooms, lockdown studios, living rooms with sunny views of forests – were difficult to place with certainty and could be either in Canada or Switzerland.

Much of Mettler’s three-hour opus takes place in an imaginative space divorced from the normal flow of time or the fixed borders of towns or countries. He is a born filmmaker, somebody for whom even a filmed diary is like clay to be moulded into whatever shapes grab him. From one moment to the other, he can shift from the mundane to the magisterial, the quotidian to the eternal. That might be in the course of just a few deftly stitched together sequences of, say, conversations with his dying father out on a gentle hike or a low-key expedition into an enclosed cave in the Alps. 

“In my films – and this one is no exception – I’m asking people to work by association. It’s not a narrative that’s going to carry away an audience. We’re engaging them to get something out of it on their terms,” he says.

Even counting for Mettler’s craft, which is renowned, it is remarkable that only these two sections of the full seven-part project alone are so affecting and speak in concert so well among themselves.

“But once we had finally shown it, there were many people coming up to me to simply talk about their own experiences with departed loved ones, with this feeling of time passing. And somehow I hadn’t even thought that far ahead [in the process]. I wasn’t expecting that. There was a lot of emotion wrapped up in the experience of watching those two parts.”

The pandemic smear 

Hasn’t it been strange, SWI asked Mettler, to get this kind of reception for a project that’s only partly finished?

“Those pandemic years were a kind of smear – I like to use this word to describe it. Time was slow, but it was also fast. Time was twisted, a smear. In the wake of that, it was nice to be back interacting with people again. As a filmmaker, to be getting feedback from a real audience while standing in front of them, to feel that experience, is special. That’s definitely a big part of filmmaking. I felt like I was getting some exercise after I’d been lying in bed for weeks.”

Mettler pauses for a moment, as if considering the pitfalls of such an epic project being so lauded while only half-born.

“But I must say, at the same time, I never really wanted to take such a big break away from making what I imagined very much as a series [of films]. We did the bulk of the shooting up until August 2021, and now we’re in 2024 and it’s going to be finished and presented – probably – in 2025. And still, it’s being talked about, discussed, written about even now. So I have to rethink my strategies. This 10-hour object is going to be a time capsule of that moment.”

A good deal has happened since summer 2021. The world has shifted dramatically, and even the domestic and natural spaces he depicts – as well as his own approach to the world – are surely different in some sense.

“Right, so many events that have been very significant for the world as a whole make an effect on you as an artist too. And I somehow feel the need to acknowledge that in an epilogue to this film, one that is closer to the present, while still preserving that feeling that you’re watching a time capsule. Really, I quite look forward to finishing this movie and moving on.”

Mettler on location in India shooting “Gambling, Gods and LSD” ©Peter Mettler

A strange homecoming 

It must have been an even more pronounced experience presenting the two parts of this nascent project in the German-speaking Swiss cantons, which is the place everything started, where he divides his time, and which holds such significance for his family.

“Certainly,” he says. “Bringing it back to Switzerland was something different altogether. My parents are from Zurich and from the St Gallen area, Toggenburg. I started to feel that in showing the film here, I was bringing them back here as well. Even though most of their family and friends aren’t around anymore, there were a few who came out for it.”

“It spoke to the circular nature of [my parents’] journey: they left for Canada, not married, not sure if they were going to stay there. It wasn’t a goal to be there forever. And then my coming along and becoming a filmmaker and telling their story and bringing that story back to Switzerland… It felt like a strange kind of homecoming.”

Edited by Virginie Mangin and Eduardo Simantob