While the Green Grass Grows: A Diary in Seven Parts

Shortly before her 90th birthday, Peter Mettler’s mother says that she really ought to live forever as she still has so much to do. A year later he buries her. The Swiss-Canadian filmmaker travels between Switzerland and Canada, visits the mountains of New Mexico and teaches at a film school in Cuba. Always accompanied by his camera, “a machine that moves me back and forth in time.” In meandering conversations he explores our eternal longing for elsewhere—the place where the grass is always greener.

Alternately tragic and comic, philosophical and poetic, Mettler’s diary, filmed over three years, combines personal conversations, family history, memoir, homage, and love, while its aesthetic is laced with psychedelic and experimental imagery and sounds that enhance its trance-like feel.

The film reaches its climax when the filmmaker is struck by a mysterious brain condition that causes him to hallucinate. During his recovery, he must relearn how to see—and how to make sense of what he sees. His mother’s words come back to him: “If you can’t see the future, you have to invent it.”