Peter Mettler’s While the Green Grass Grows is underpinned by the devastating loss of the filmmaker’s parents.

If the freewheeling films of Peter Mettler often feel attuned to a mystical design, that’s because fate and coincidence are no strangers to the Canadian maverick.

His latest film, While the Green Grass Grows: A Diary in Seven Parts , formalizes life’s great mysteries with a relaxed, rambling rhythm that confidently blends the cosmic and the quotidian.

Composed of vérité footage, staged abstractions, poetic musings, and lively conversations spanning years and continents, the seven-hour visual diary opens and closes with the filmmaker’s cyclical declaration: “It’s my birthday again.” Mettler was born on Sept. 7, which, coincidentally, was also the date of his film’s first publi

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