september 2025

Congratulations to my dear friend Peter Mettler, whose new film While the Green Grass Grows: A Diary in Seven Parts received its world premiere at this year’s TIFF this month.

I was lucky to work on this project in my role as manager of Peter’s production company, Grimthorpe Film, between 2016 to 2020. There is so much that can be said about While the Green Grass Grows, and with a runtime of seven hours it’s perhaps Peter’s most epic film, although it’s also his most intimate. What the film does—with length, authenticity, interiority, and cinematic form—is unique and remarkable. A friend once told me that 95% of artists don’t experiment, and of the 5% who do, 95% of those people don’t experiment much beyond their initial gestures. Peter is an artist who fills that tiny gap of those who continually reinvent themselves, improvising into the unknown. It’s a film about death, a family about family, a film about coincidences, nature, and history, but at its fundamental core, I think it’s a film about love. And, as Bruce Elder says, “love is an art of time.”

Cinema—and “content”—is so optimized these days for efficiency and lacking depth. This work is a salve for our algorithmic era.

While the Green Grass Grows: A Diary in Seven Parts (2025)