Starting this weekend, Cinema Detroit  (formerly known as Cass City Cinema and the Burton Theater) will run a series of screenings of Peter Mettler’s experimental documentary, The End of Time, which explores the perception of time. The film splits screen time between a number of exotic locations, including the particle accelerator at CERN, lava flows on the Big Island in Hawaii, an area adjacent to the place of Buddha’s enlightenment, and inner city Detroit. All this in pursuit of the slippery concept of time perception and the connection between esoteric, religious and scientific understandings of its meaning.

The End of Time joins the small but memorable genre of existential documentaries.

The film begins showing Friday, January 10th  at 7:30 p.m., followed by a screening on Saturday, January 11th at 7:30 p.m. that will include an introduction and Q&A with director Peter Mettler, and two screenings on Sunday, January 12th, at 4:30 and 7 p.m. The final screening will be the following Thursday, January 16th at 7:30 p.m. The End of Time constitutes the third film by Peter Mettler in a trilogy that began with Picture of Light in 1996 and was followed by Gambling, Gods, and LSD in 2002.

One of the denizens of a Detroit farming community prepares the smoker before tending to her bees.

The portion shot in Detroit centers around an independent farming community that sprung up amid Detroit’s depopulating East Side over two decades ago, and has developed into a thriving meta-society and true Detroit city story. This story and others, including a visit with the occupant of the sole home left standing amid a subdivision that was progressively wiped out by lava flows on The Big Island in Hawaii, serve to create an existential background for the exploration of time as a matter of perception rather than fact.

Still, if you’d like to see it, you’d better check those screening times; as befits a movie about the ephemeral nature of time, these special screenings will fly by before you know it!

Cinema Detroit: 3420 Cass Ave., Detroit; 313-281-8301; cinemadetroit.com