A movie would open in big cities, then circulate to smaller and more distant towns, before ending up, usually after two years, at farflung Dawson City. Because the distributors didn’t want the prints back, it was up to people in the town to dispose of them.

Some were thrown into the Yukon River. Some were burned: a hazardous undertaking, since the films’ silver nitrate content made them highly combustible. Other films, though, met the unusual fate of being used to fill in a municipal swimming pool that was being paved over to make an ice-skating rink. And it was there, during a construction project in 1978, that hundreds of them were discovered and returned to the world, creating the mother lode of celluloid images known as the Dawson City Collection.