Hlynur Pálmason On Authenticity, Slow Filmmaking, And His Funny, Atmospheric “Joan of Arc”

“It’s a very playful film that nobody wanted,” says director Hlynur Pálmason, speaking to a live audience at Bíó Paradís after the premiere of Joan of Arc (Jóhanna af Örk in Icelandic), the closing film of the Stockfish Film & Industry Festival. Based in East Iceland, Hlynur rarely visits the capital, and even more rarely with his family, who also happen to be the cast. Often described as a sidebar to his previous feature, The Love That Remains, and at times overlapping it, the 62-minute film is being shown in Iceland for the first time. Judging by the almost constant chuckles in the audience, Hlynur says it’s been special to watch the film with viewers who understand the nuances of the language.

It is a short stop in Reykjavík, and, by the next afternoon, when I give him a call, Hlynur is already on location outside Höfn.

“After my first two films, I had this feeling that I didn’t like the distance between an idea and filming it. There’s years between,” he says. “There’s playfulness, and spontaneity, and an impulse that goes away in that process.”

“I just kept filming and this very strange little film became, actually, my favourite of everything I’ve made.”

When he and his family returned to Iceland after more than a decade in Denmark, he wanted to bridge that distance. “I thought, can we just buy a camera and make small, playful things while we’re developing and making bigger things, the bigger ones being the features that finance the way we live?”

Somehow Hlynur managed to make it work. Spending years financing a film only to shoot it in two months is perhaps his worst nightmare. He’s always been more interested in exploring narrative threads than traditional plot, often taking just as much time to do so. In Godland, he filmed a decomposing horse for two years; in The Love That Remains, he spent years following the threads of a family; and Joan of Arc, shot over three years, began as a “process of getting into The Love That Remains.”

As Hlynur kept filming, writing and exploring, he fell more in love with the story. “I just kept filming and this very strange little film became, actually, my favourite of everything I’ve made,” he admits.

Play, punches, and magic

Filmed in a small camera house equipped with a sound recording system, within walking distance from Hlynur’s home on the outskirts of Höfn, Joan of Arc uses a single frame for the entirety of its runtime. In it, energetic twins, Grímur and Þórgils, Hlynur’s own sons, build a knight-like figure to shoot arrows at. It’s a task that seems to keep them busy for months: first they dig a hole, install a pole, build and rebuild the dummy, all while throwing punches at each other and breaking into sibling squabbles. In the background, seasons change, birds fly away and return, the ground erupts with grass and flowers, then hardens under ice, and the sky changes from summer hues to crisp winter blue.

Their older sister, Ída Mekkín, appears on screen from time to time, laughing at the boys, teasing them. This DIY backyard project holds no interest for her — she’s a teenager now, and likely spends most of her time locked up in her room watching Narcos. But once the hard work is done, she eagerly picks up a bow and names the figure Joan of Arc, teaching the boys that women can be knights too.

The tangible energy between the kids is the foundation of the film. Not for a second do you doubt that they’re actually siblings — they move around the screen with an ease only those who grew up in the same house, likely sharing a bedroom, can. Little teases, small jokes, the casual cruelty of making someone feel stupid without really meaning it — all of it feels natural, almost impossible to write. While the film uses written dialogue for deeper or more philosophical moments, more often Hlynur simply creates the circumstances and steps back. “It was about creating setups where I maybe wouldn’t write a scene, but I would, for example, give one of the boys a brand new shovel, and one of them an old one,” he explains. “It’s like tension without doing anything, almost.”

Blending fiction with spontaneity, Hlynur often let the camera roll even as the boys fought on the ground, watching carefully to ensure it didn’t get out of control. “They’re used to it, and they’re good at pulling through even if they hurt themselves. Of course, never seriously,” he says. “I didn’t want it to be sentimental. I wanted it to be a little bit rough, like it is.”

“My favourite scenes are actually some of the long freestyle scenes with the boys,” he continues, “where they’re just talking shit for five minutes — just talking, throwing punches, making fun of each other, shooting arrows. Those scenes are absolutely impossible to write, and I think they’re just magical.” They evolve naturally, he adds, and were the reason he fell for the process of making this film.

Capturing time

This sense of authenticity allowed Hlynur to be playful in ways his previous features hadn’t, pushing into surreal territory, dabbling in magical realism and slapstick humour. “I knew that this kind of magical, absurd, weird, surreal side would only work if the family felt real,” he says.

Finding the right frame, however, took time. “It’s only one frame for three years, for 62 minutes, and that kind of sounds really boring, but actually there’s a tension in that. How do you make that work? It’s really difficult,” he says. “It’s a beautiful challenge for us as filmmakers: how can you make one frame work, and how do you build on that?”

“The things that I’m interested in making are the things that only I can make.”

The frame he chose, though static, feels almost tactile and layered — sky, sea, small islands, cliff, grass — add the rapid changes of East Iceland’s weather and it almost comes alive. Small moments of magic, like “the sound of birds coming after winter,” kept Hlynur returning to the camera house for days, sometimes months. “I could feel that these things were impacting me,” he says. “So I hope that if you spent an hour in the cinema, it would also impact the audience.”

The extended nature of the process meant that Hlynur served as his own cinematographer. Working with his frequent collaborator, Copenhagen-based Maria von Hausswolff, simply wasn’t practical. “She has her own life and family, and it would be too expensive to fly her over here each time I pick up the camera,” he says.

Before they leave the nest

As Hlynur talks about the making of the film, I ask whether it exists in part because the cast are his own children — real sibling dynamics, and the kind of 24/7 access most filmmakers can only dream of.

“The things that I’m interested in making are the things that only I can make,” he answers. “And I don’t mean that in an arrogant way or anything. I’m not saying that these are the best things in the world.” What he means is working with his surroundings, both in terms of landscape and people. Look through credits of any of his films and you’ll notice the same names returning, both actors or crew, reinvited project after project. “It is creating a life and a family of filmmakers so you can work together, and it’s not about only one singular project — it’s about growing older together and making different things.”

His kids have no interest in pursuing acting or filmmaking, but they’re curious enough to take part — and as Hlynur notes with a smile, they get paid. There’s a more sentimental reason too, one that Hlynur has spoken about openly: time. Making films with children is a way of spending time with them before they grow up and their lives pull them elsewhere. He’s already experiencing that with his eldest daughter, Ída, who recently turned 18 and moved away to study.

“One of your main characters, who is a lot in your films, suddenly has a smaller role — just naturally because she doesn’t live with us anymore. And, suddenly, the boys kind of step in and become the main characters. This isn’t something we pre-plan or preconceive. It’s just something that happens very naturally, and that’s my favourite thing,” says Hlynur. “Whether it’s films, video installations, paintings or whatever, if the work you’re making surprises you in some way, that’s the best thing in the world.”

While he treasures time with his children, Hlynur sees both life and work as evolving chapters. “When you grow older, there are new things and new dilemmas in life and things you experience and the people around you — so you begin exploring different things,” he says. “I can feel a change from the things that I’m planning in the future, they’re quite different from the things that I’m making now.”

A fragile industry

A few weeks earlier, I spoke to Stockfish Managing Director Dögg Mósesdóttir, who noted that Joan of Arc is the festival’s only Icelandic premiere. “There have just been very few films made because of cut-downs in the film industry,” she said.

“Which is scary,” Hlynur adds. “Whether it’s directors, gaffers, editors, or whatever, the filmmaking community is really struggling now because there’s less and less money to put into filmmaking and culture. The film fund, the foundation for Icelandic cinema, for the language of Icelandic cinema, is being cut. It’s almost impossible to nourish cinema and the next generation of filmmakers.”

Hlynur admits he is among the lucky few. Last year, he premiered two films, in part thanks to international collaborations. Joan of Arc, he notes, only found its audience because distributors who bought The Love That Remains were willing to take a chance on it. Otherwise, getting such an experimental, strange work out into the world would be difficult. “If I wouldn’t have that,” he says, “I wouldn’t have survived as a filmmaker because there would be too much of a gap between films.”

Hlynur is already deep in new projects, though he admits, “It’s not looking very good with the government right now, in their lack of love towards the arts.” He’s a year into filming his fifth feature, On Land and Sea, which pushes beyond the terrain of Godland. “It’s basically the genesis story of my hometown. It’s a story of a family that deconstructs their house and turns it into a raft to sail to the other side of the mountain, to rebuild their house and find a home,” he explains, stressing, “That’s actually a true story. I know that nobody will believe me, because in Godland, I wrote that it’s a true story, and it wasn’t. But this is actually a true story.”

Joan of Arc is screening at Bíó Paradís. See showtimes at bioparadis.is