(Bill Morrison, US 2024, 64 min., DCP)
Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Bill Morrison is proud to present the world premiere of the standalone film version of darker. Created in collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang, darker marks the ninth collaboration between Lang and Morrison across twenty-four years of working together.
With darker, Morrison takes inspiration from Lang’s restrained and highly detailed score to create what he describes as a slowly lilting depiction of the sublime, in which actors, dancers, and acrobats reappear and disappear back into a bubbling morass of time. Morrison’s films often incorporate imagery from decomposing nitrate films, creating a haunting photochemical effect. Originally conceived as a live film and music performance, darker is presented at the Nitrate Picture Show in the first standalone screening of the film, with a newly prepared digital presentation incorporating a 5.1 mix of the original score.
Bill Morrison’s work often reframes long-forgotten moving images. The New York Times has called him “the poet laureate of lost films.” His films have premiered at the New York, Sundance, Telluride, and Venice film festivals. He is best known for Decasia (2002), Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016), and the short film Incident (2023), which received an Academy Award nomination in 2025.