Traffic comes to a slow halt, iridescent headlights are muted and residential city blocks go quiet as a blizzard obscures the urban landscape in Snow, an immersive short by Peter Middleton. Narrated by John Hull, an Australian-born academic who has written extensively about his late-in-life loss of sight, the film captures the effect of the weather on his daily life, transforming his surroundings beyond tactile recognition. “John’s diaries contain so much rich and evocative imagery, articulated in a language that is wonderfully cinematic,” explains Middleton of the journal entries that inspired his visual retelling of Hull’s story, in which blindness is described as “the borderland between dream and memory.” 

This view partly informed the director’s decision to shoot on 8mm film, “to capture something of the ethereal experience of blindness, and create a world that traverses the line between the familiar and the unreal.” Filmed in the United Kingdom during the infamous winter of December 2010 and again in February 2012, Snow was the starting point for Middleton’s upcoming feature about Hull, Into Darkness. Based on more than 16 hours of audio recordings kept by Hull when he first began to lose his sight, the documentary, co-directed by James Spinney, was also the source of Rainfall, which premiered on NOWNESS during this October’s wetter, fall weather.