If you’ve seen the excellent documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time, you’ll be familiar with this incredible story. In 1978, a construction crew made an amazing discovery in Dawson City in northwestern Yukon, Canada, unearthing a treasure trove of more than 500 silent film reels, all thought to have been lost forever. In a 1979 issue of American Film, Sam Kula, the director of the National Film Archives of Canada, while still in the early stages of cataloging and restoring the films, describes the Dawson City cache as “a very significant archival find in the history of cinema.”
