The Dawson City International Short Film Festival

There is a specific pleasure in watching a film outdoors at midnight in Dawson City in July, when the light is still bright enough to read by and the air is warm enough to be comfortable without a jacket. The pleasure is partly the film itself, and partly the improbability of what you are doing — watching cinema in a gold rush town above the 64th parallel, in a setting that the filmmakers whose work you are watching almost certainly did not imagine when they made it. The Dawson City International Short Film Festival happens every July, run by the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in partnership with various community institutions. It brings a selection of short films — documentary, fiction, animation, experimental — from across Canada and internationally to Dawson City for screenings in venues that include the Palace Grand Theatre, an outdoor screen, and the Odd Fellows Hall where KIAC has its permanent base. The festival is not large by the standards of major international film festivals. It does not have a red carpet or a celebrity focus or a market where industry deals are made. What it has is films — carefully selected, presented in a setting that makes seeing them an event rather than a routine — and the kind of audience that a film festival in a remote northern town attracts: people who have made a deliberate effort to be there, who are genuinely interested in what they are going to see, and who are prepared to engage with challenging and unconventional work. ## The Films The selection of films for the Dawson festival reflects the programming priorities of an institution with a genuine curatorial perspective. The emphasis is on short films that take risks — that are doing something formally interesting or thematically ambitious — rather than on the safe, likeable work that dominates many festival programs. This means that some of what screens at Dawson is genuinely difficult: not entertaining in the easy sense, but demanding of the audience in ways that produce real thinking and real feeling. This is not for everyone. Visitors to Dawson City who come to the festival expecting comfortable entertainment will sometimes be surprised by what they see. The festival has no obligation to be accessible or commercial, and it does not try to be. It is a festival for people who take film seriously as an art form, and it programs accordingly. The films that screen at Dawson come from a range of national cinemas and from the full range of short film forms. Documentary shorts about Indigenous communities, experimental animations from European film schools, fiction films from emerging Canadian filmmakers, and work that resists easy categorization are all part of the mix. The programming team, working with modest resources, manages to assemble a program that is consistently surprising. ## The Setting as Context One of the things that makes the Dawson festival distinctive — beyond the quality of the programming — is the way the setting functions as context for the films. Watching a film about a remote northern community in Dawson City creates a resonance that the same film shown in Toronto or Vancouver would not produce. The landscape and the history that surround the screenings give certain kinds of work a charge that amplifies their meaning. The outdoor screenings, in particular, have a quality that is unique to Dawson. The screen set up in an open space, with the hills visible above and the midnight light in the sky, creates a viewing experience that is part cinema and part landscape event. The films shown outdoors tend to be selected with this context in mind — work that can hold its own against the competition of a subarctic summer night. ## The Community Around the Festival The Dawson City Short Film Festival functions not just as a programming event but as a gathering of the community of people who care about film — both the Dawson community and the wider community of filmmakers and viewers who travel for it. The days around the screenings have the informal quality of a small arts festival: conversations in cafes, encounters between filmmakers and audience members, the kind of extended discussion of what you have seen and thought that a focused, small-scale event makes possible. Filmmakers who bring their work to Dawson often report that the experience of presenting it there is different from presenting it at larger festivals. The size of the audience is smaller, but the engagement is deeper. People have traveled a long way and have made a conscious choice to be there; they are not casual attendees who wandered in from a nearby hotel bar. The conversations that follow screenings are substantive in a way that is not universal at larger events. ## The Dawson City Film Find The film festival has a specific historical precedent in Dawson City that is worth knowing about: the Dawson City Film Find of 1978. Workers constructing a new recreation centre in Dawson City uncovered a cache of more than five hundred film reels that had been buried in an old utility building since the 1920s. The films — many of them silent-era features and newsreels that were believed to have been lost — had been preserved by the permafrost. They represented an extraordinary discovery of cinema history. The films were carefully recovered, documented, and eventually restored. Many of them are now held at Library and Archives Canada and at the Library of Congress. The Dawson City Film Find is considered one of the most significant film preservation discoveries of the twentieth century, and it gave the community a specific and personal relationship to the history of cinema that informs the festival's identity. The [Dawson City Travel Guide](/guide/dawson-city-travel-guide) covers the festival dates and the venues used for screenings, as well as the other arts events that animate Dawson City's summer calendar. If you are a film person — if you care about cinema as an art form and want to see it in one of the most unusual and evocative settings in the world — the Dawson festival belongs on your calendar. The films are good. The setting is extraordinary. The audience is paying attention.