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Vík Town Guide: Fish Burgers, Black Sands & Scratchy Magic
Vík í Mýrdal, the southernmost town in Iceland, is a two-and-a-half or three-and-a-half hours’ drive from Reykjavík, depending on how often you get out of the car, and so for many people it’s the natural end point of a day trip taking…
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Siglufjörður Town Guide: Hikes, Herring And Hot Pots
In the international TV hit ‘Trapped’, Siglufjörður is a place of dismembered corpses and human trafficking; dark secrets and guilty consciences; a CGI ferry looming ominously in the harbour; endless nights of snow and wind; and one very tired, very sexy crime-solving,…
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Far North: An Eyjafjörður Itinerary
The greatest luxury in Icelandic travel: turning off the Ring Road, pausing that inexorable vacation countdown timer, and burning one of your precious days discovering the answer to the question that forever haunts memories of every once-in-a-lifetime trip abroad: “I wonder what’s…
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The Silver Of The Sea: Siglufjörður’s Living Dioramas
A herring might not be suitable for cutting down the mightiest tree in the forest, but don’t underestimate its power: for much of the 20th century, herring proved it could make or break a whole community. The Herring Era Museum, in Siglufjörður,…
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The Next ‘Case’: Icelandic TV Keeps The Scandi-Noir Hits Coming
The second series of Icelandic courtroom drama ‘Réttur’ ended in 2010, with quite a cliffhanger: a lawyer is on a hunting trip with an eccentric client, who picks up his rifle and announces that he’s always wanted to take aim at the…
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Hold My Beer: Brews, Bros, Beards and Business at the Icelandic Beer Festival
“Well… we’re not losing money by coming here,” an ultra-friendly Australian craft brewer tells me above the din at the Icelandic Beer Festival. He works for Pirate Life, out of Adelaide, South Australia, and he’s just poured me their IPA, so pleasantly…
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One From The Heart: An Interview With Heartstone’s Director
Consider this dilemma: You’re thirteen. You’re offered a starring role in a movie. But, you have to spend much of the film in your underwear being emotionally vulnerable, and you have to kiss another boy. “I would never have done it myself,”…
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The Saga of Icelandic Cinema: ‘Cold Fever’
In 1989, Jim Jarmusch was unable to attend the Reykjavík Film Festival screenings of ‘Mystery Train’. In his stead, he sent producer Jim Stark, who ended up hitting it off with Friðrik Þór Friðriksson, at once the leading luminary and the enfant…
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The Hardest Day Of The Year: Baltasar Kormákur’s ‘101 Reykjavík’
“Christmas—the hardest day of the year.” Hlýnur (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) is dreading the traditional Icelandic Christmas dinner, rendered in Baltasar Kormákur’s ‘101 Reykjavík’ (2000) as a soul-sucking trip out of the downtown bubble and into the heart of bourgeois darkness: a new…
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Best When Fresh: Erlingur Thoroddsen Brings Horror To Iceland
The first movie the filmmaker Erlingur Thoroddsen remembers seeing is the 1989 Tim Burton/Michael Keaton ‘Batman’, at multiplex in the Reykjavík suburbs. “I just remember the music and how dark it was,” he says now of his first impressions of cinema. “I…
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Baltasar’s Take on Taken: ‘The Oath’
‘The Oath’ is something of a palette-cleanser for director and star Baltasar Kormákur, back in his own backyard after a couple years helming far-flung blockbusters. It also reflects the practical outlook of RVK Studios, his production company: following ‘Trapped’, a reverse-engineered Nordic…
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RIFF Guide: What To See If You’re Into…
The RIFF audience has a lot of decisions to make with a program than spans eleven days and screens over 140 movies. Our trusted cinephile Mark Asch compiled a list of recommendations to guide you on your way. Here is what to see…
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Last Splash: Didda Speaks About Sólveig Anspach
Didda Jónsdóttir, who has played a frizzy-haired, pot-smoking hippie in four films by Solveig Anspach, remembers the first time she met her director. It was at the local swimming pool, Laugardalslaug, when they were both girls. Didda and I are talking about…
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The Saga Of Icelandic Cinema: ‘Country Wedding’
“It’s a film about two families that are forced to spend time together,” ‘Country Wedding’ director Valdís Óskarsdóttir explained to the Grapevine in 2008. “They can stand each other for one hour but they get lost and instead of one hour, they…
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The Saga Of Icelandic Cinema: ‘Nói the Albino’
Probably the most Icelandic moment in ‘Nói albínói’—and this is a very Icelandic movie, about Malt Extract, carrot cake, winter, and depression—is the scene in which our hero romances a girl by teaching her to smoke cigarettes. Indoors. In 2003. There is…
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The Saga of Icelandic Cinema: ‘Sódóma Reykjavík’
That this boring fishing town could be any kind of Sin City is very much the joke. “Ó borg mín borg,” sings Björk over the end credits of 1992’s ‘Sódóma Reykjavík’—“Oh city, my city.” The film’s end credits play over a helicopter…
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The Saga Of Icelandic Cinema: ‘Stella í Orlofi’
‘Stella í Orlofi’ (“Stella on Holiday”) is known in English as ‘The Icelandic Shock Station’, though referring to the 1986 film by its English title implies that the film is known abroad at all. It isn’t, except by the curious few who’ve…
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The Saga Of Icelandic Cinema: ‘Rokk í Reykjavík’
A legendary document of 101 cool in the pre-Inspired by Iceland era, rockumentary ‘Rokk í Reykjavík’ (1982) captures the ascendancy of a generation of young Icelanders taking American and British influences for granted, and moving beyond them to forge a pop culture…
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The Saga of Icelandic Cinema: ‘Land and Sons’
There had been Icelandic movies before the 1980 release ‘Land and Sons’, but in the Saga of Icelandic Cinema they’d be the genealogies setting up the real action. What historians call the “Icelandic Film Spring” begins with the formation of the Icelandic…
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‘Keep Frozen’ : Tote That Barge! Lift That Bale!
There are “oceans” of albums out there, says the crane operator—more music than he could ever listen to in his lifetime, so he doesn’t try to keep up with everything anymore. Download as much as you like, but you’ve still got the…
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Written In The Stars: ‘O, Brazen Age’ at Bíó Paradís
“Letting nostalgia wash over me—I find this extremely satisfying and also heartbreaking at the same time,” says Canadian writer-director Alexander Carson, whose first feature, ‘O, Brazen Age,’ plays at Bíó Paradís this weekend. In the film, a constellation of characters orbit one…
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2015: The Year The Icelandic Indie Film Community Awakened Some More, Potentially,
Ísland, bezt í heimi! The biggest film of 2015—nay, the biggest film of ALL TIME (*projected)—was Icelandic, or anyway a few scenes of ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ were shot here. Tour companies are no doubt designing itineraries for their Ice Planet…
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Deconstructing The Three Dogateers: Paw-Teur Theory
No cinematic genre testifies more urgently to the realities of contemporary American family life than the direct-to-video talking-pet movie. A deceptively homespun transposition of a French literary classic to a middle-class American household, ‘The Three Dogateers’ is an incisive work that fits…
