Gambling, Gods And LSD

A filmmaker's inquiry into transcendence becomes a three-hour trip across countries and cultures, interconnecting people, places and times. From Toronto, the scene of his childhood, Peter Mettler sets out on a journey that includes evangelism at the airport strip, demolition in Las Vegas, tracings in the Nevada desert, chemistry and street life in Switzerland, and the coexistence of technology and divinity in contemporary India. Everywhere along the way, the same themes are to be found: thrill-seeking, luck, destiny, belief, expanding perception, the craving for security in an uncertain world. Fact joins with fantasy; the search for meaning and the search for ecstasy begin to merge.

Mettler blends documentary observation with lyrical camerawork, location sound with aural sculpture. The result is an audio-visual composition whose movements challenge our preconceptions, evoking in us the wonder and awe of our daily existence. It is a mosaic of moments where the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. GAMBLING, GODS AND LSD invites the viewer to actively participate in the making of meaning, so that the central theme of the film and the experience of watching it become one and the same.

"Peter Mettler's film emerges from an obsessional and confused superimposition of images and sounds. From an impenetrable magma springs the cinematographic gesture, the desire to snatch from reality a number of trails to follow. GAMBLING, GODS AND LSD invites us on a journey between Canada, the United States, Switzerland and India, offering an exploration of places full of ordinary stories and legends. The incestuous relations between nature and culture, the timeless beauty of the desert and the cascades swathed in their mineral violence, and the incredible power of the planes that slash the sky with their trails of noise, compose the visual and sonic themes of a multiple narrative.
Characters talk about their existential search. They live and survive off magnificently dangerous expedients, drugs; dubiously stimulated desire, payed sex; spectacularly unifying fervours, religions. Between a Christian gathering in Toronto, a street parade in Zurich and a ceremony of ecstatic devotion in Southern India, the filmmaker reflects upon profound cultural differences and suggests a number of points of convergence. An anthropologist in his own special way Mettler ceaselessly confronts reality in an intuitive manner, distances himself from it, and conveys its fascinating complexity. The film closely follows its movements and its layers.
Proceeding by gradual immersion within the places he explores – Mettler is not a hurried traveller – he captures its material harshness, its fragments of beauty, and meditates about the spiritual and metaphysical dimensions of life. This film reveals the film-maker's way of being in the world. From his countries of origin, Canada and Switzerland, to India, a land of fascinating strangeness, the film-maker approaches existences, ranging from collective hallucinations to solitary quests, which seem both static and hectic. In search of the profound meaning of the being, between redemption and renouncement, these characters persistently, painfully pursue a set path which they might at times be advised to turn back on.
In fact, GAMBLING, GODS AND LSD is like a paperback book, something to take with you on holiday! Along with a good pair of walking shoes, it is the ideal companion to stimulate the senses and guide one's steps."
Jean Perret, Visions du Réel Nyon