Tag: fiction

Discover Iceland in all its glory!

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

The Icelandic movie Echo (Bergmál), which premiered in competition at the 72nd Locarno Film Festival, is a major step up in form and content for Icelandic director Rúnar Rúnarsson. Set over the Christmas period, its a wide-spanning portrayal of the nation that’s equal parts profound, funny, and banal. Its standout quality is the way it marries formalist rigour — each scene focusing on a new character and shot with a single static camera — with emotion, humour and philosophical enquiry. We sat down with the director to discuss his unique approach to hybrid forms, Icelandic society, and working with real people.

Read our review now!

Redmond Bacon – Echo is very different from single character portraits Volcano (2011) and Sparrows (2015). Why the massive change in tone?

Rúnar Rúnarsson – I wouldn’t say that its a massive change in tone. People say to me: “you made some radical changes in your life making this film”. The fundamental difference is that we are portraying society instead of one person, but I think the fingertips of the creative team and I are quite similar.

RB – Echo takes such a panoramic view of Iceland. Do you think it will strike a chord across Icelandic society?

RR – Festival-wise my films have always done well, but I’ve never sold tickets anywhere, not even at home. I’ve been privileged in my life to do the things that I wanted. But you can’t have it all. You can’t have sold out theatres night after night. My main aim has always been to follow my vision. I have no expectations towards ticket sales, in Iceland or elsewhere. To be completely honest, I don’t think in this way. I have a big misconception of my films though. I think they are really audience friendly but I’m still regarded as an “artist director”!

RB – I think Echo is very accessible due to how true to life it is, and its humour. The form of the film is a hybrid between documentary footage and fiction. How much was documentary footage and how much was fiction?

RR – There was a really detailed manuscript. I think there were maybe nine or ten scenes that didn’t end up in the film. The rules we had were made for effect. I think we achieved a sense of authenticity. We decided not to say what is real and what is in full control. Anyway, even when you look at a fly-on-the-wall documentary, there are decisions such as when you come in and out of a shot and how its put together. There is always a sense of the author.

RB – Yes, there’s always an artificiality to a documentary, because you choose what to put in, you choose what to take out and you choose how to present it and edit it together. It doesn’t just happen by itself.

RR – All my fictional films are about things I’ve gone through in my life or people close to me. My goal is to be honest and capture a sense of reality and a sense of my emotions; to put it out for whoever would be interested. Most scenes in this film are in a greyscale. All people in front of the camera are under their own identity; sometimes you hear their names. And it is their real names. Often they are in their native surroundings.

Echo

RB – These are native actors playing versions of themselves?

RR – Sometimes being themselves, sometimes following a script. There are some with acting backgrounds, then they went into farming and play a farmer in the film.

RB – There’s so many different perspectives in the film…

RR – Iceland is a small community. The Prime Minister of Iceland [Katrín Jakobsdóttir] is in this film. We bumped into her while shooting another scene. There are homeless people as well. I know the assistant to the Prime Minister and I know one of the homeless people really well. In a society so small, you know somebody in every situation.

RB – So there isn’t a massive divide between rich in poor in terms of being aware of each other?

RR – No. It’s so small. But the gap is getting bigger. There is private education and healthcare, which didn’t exist when I was growing up. Society is changing, but it still has this Scandinavian Social Democratic foundation.

RB – You tackle the Panama Papers scandal when former Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson had to resign. Was it important to have these contemporaneous elements too?

RR – We shot during Christmas 2018. There were things debated at the time that ended up in the film. But it’s not about the truth of the period; it’s an echo, hence the title, portraying fragments of life from Iceland during that time.

RB – I want to talk about another Scandinavian director. Roy Andersson. Echo has a similar mise en scène to The Living Trilogy (2000-14)? Was this an inspiration?

RR – A friend of mine didn’t understand the project I was working on. I was about to go to the financing place and gave him the script. He went through it and said: “It’s going to be really simple for you to present this film. Just tell people to imagine if Vittorio Di Sica would make a Roy Andersson film.”

RB – In terms of narration it reminded me of the British movie Love Actually (Richard Curtis, 2003), in that there’s a lot of stories set around Christmas and the season itself becomes the narrator. Was this an inspiration at all?

RR – No. But when I was developing the movie it was at first about these fragments of life. First I thought about doing it over the period of a year. But I wouldn’t ever be able to afford it, and the more I developed it, the more I wanted to have more control. I felt like Christmas was the right framework because it’s hard to sympathise with people you don’t know. In normal films you have the time to build up a character and for the audience to care about them. Here you meet people and then they’re gone and never reappear…

RB – But Christmas gives it this sentimental overlay?

RR – Yes. It’s an amplifier of our emotions. It helps the audience to be put in the place of these people. Many of them have been in these situations. It’s a time of year where people are more observant. They try to be better people; more generous and open-minded. At the same time, for many people, it’s the worst time of the year. It was a good guide to constructing a narrative.

RB – Was it all shot within this two week period?

RR – There was one scene we just had to do earlier. The burning house scene is from another time of the year.

RB – That’s a very evocative scene. It reminded me of The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986).

RR – He had to burn that house two times.

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RB – Films are always set against nature, a natural byproduct, I guess, of shooting in Iceland. But this film seems mostly focused on the people itself, which goes against a conventional approach to depicting the country. Was this intentional?

RR – It was never my intention of decorating something in nature. Nature is a part of living in Iceland. Look out the window and there are mountains! Nature is beautiful. But it shouldn’t only be used for decoration or production value. You should use it as a narrative tool. In a perfect film, everything that you see or hear should have a function. For example, the final shot of the film is there not only because its beautiful. It’s a metaphor of life continuing. Water is a transition, a vessel in the water, going through the tides and waves. It’s the year ahead.

RB – There are some great transitions, such as between a Children’s Christmas Pageant and a Bikini Body Building Contest. How long did it take to think “OK, this will go here and this will go there” before putting these scenes together to develop the film’s rhythm?

RR – We slowly put the film together while we were shooting. Working with these tableaus. Whether you go 10 seconds earlier in or out of a scene can have such an impact on the rhythm. So we try to take enlightened decisions. But you shouldn’t be too clever. You have to follow your instincts.

RB – The film has a strong cycle of life theme, best expressed when it contrasts New Years Eve celebrations with a baby being born. How did you gain the trust of the couple to film a live birth?

RR – Like with many other people in the film, it was a search for the right people who were generous enough to share their lives. There were many other people who showed interest then backed out. We have no control over a birth. We are not cutting either. We thought we would have to shoot many different births to have something to choose between. But we were just extremely lucky and only shot one birth.

To get people to participate in this kind of thing is about being honest with what we want to achieve. I don’t want to to manipulate anybody; whether its real people or my fictional characters. They represent something in me and I want to respect myself. Sometimes I’ve been to film school conducting lectures. At the end the moderators ask: “Do you have a message to the students? What should they do?”

And I say “Be honest!”

Photo Credit: Ottavia Bosello. Also pictured: Producers Live Hide (left) and Lilja Ósk Snorradóttir (right). Others photos are from the film itself.

Echo (Bergmál)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

This film is basically Love Actually (Richard Curtis, 2003) directed by Roy Andersson. Comprised of only 56 static takes, Rúnar Rúnarsson calmly takes Iceland’s pulse during the Christmas season; delivering a panorama that is equal parts funny, sad, ironic and loving. Displaying a supreme confidence in direction and writing, this is a major step up in form and content.

I’m surprised Rúnarsson had something so sentimental within him. His last two films, Volcano (2011) and Sparrows (2015), are far harsher visions of life. In contrast, Echo takes in nearly every human emotion, all wrapped up in an inescapably sentimental Christmassy bow.

It spans through the Advent season to the New Year, that time of year when families are reunited, stress levels are high, and wallets are strained. Everyone is in the mood to either try and enjoy themselves, or simply get through the darkest days in the year. Spanning from rich to poor, old to young, alone or surrounded with family, it feels like all of Icelandic life is contained within this film.

The static frames work wonders, Rúnarsson cleverly using these aesthetic limits to his advantage. Like in Andersson’s “The Living Trilogy” (2000-2014) the wide lens allows for multiple stories to play out in the same frame and for stories to change in perspective depending on whether characters are in the foreground or the background. It would’ve been easy to simply have filmed these stories in a conventional way, but this ambitious arthouse approach elevates it into the sublime.

Some scenes work as self-contained short stories. From the girl visiting her father hilariously upstaged by her step-sister to the stressed dad wondering what Christmas tree to buy to the poor woman visiting her grandfather with dementia, we get a sense of entire personalities, conflicts and histories through the fleetest of glimpses. There are elements of the documentary too, real people captured in the midst of old traditions (singing Silent Night in Icelandic) and the modern world (a huge gym full of TV screens and people on treadmills).

Echo

Nonetheless, this is no mere depiction of standard Western practices and customs, but a specifically Icelandic piece that also tackles the most problematic parts of its society. The Panama Papers scandal is invoked, as is the wealth gap, food banks and drug addiction. The question of immigration is also a hot topic here: from an African-American expat using a sun-bed to ward off darkness-induced depression to border police raiding a sanctuary church, we see that Iceland is a nation in the process of significant demographic change. While not containing anything as shocking as the ending of Sparrows, Rúnarsson deftly shows how Iceland’s relative success still doesn’t work for everyone.

Juxtaposition is constantly used, sometimes for humour (when a Christmas pageant is contrasted with a bikini body-building contest), sometimes for profundity (the birth of a child occurring directly after the New Year celebrations are rung in) and sometimes for political effect (contrasting people queuing up at a food bank with a lavish family meal). The editing by Jacob Secher Schulsinger is crisp and precise, everything compressed into a transient 79 minutes. Watching it is akin to reading an epic poem, with each image boiled down to its purest essence.

What’s interesting to note is that there are few images of Iceland’s natural beauty. Instead the people themselves are the main focus of this tale. When you consider that the population of the country (338,000 people) is just above that of Coventry, it can be safely asserted that at least 1% of the entire nation is represented here. One of the Christmas traditions in Iceland, at least according to this movie, is to give each other a big hug when the Church bells chime in the big day. This is an apt metaphor for the movie itself, which acts as a warm, loving embrace from one of the world’s coldest places.

Echo showed at the 2019 Locarno Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It’s on Mubi in August 2020.

Echo is in our list of Top 10 dirtiest films of 2019.

The Return

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The plight of Koreans adopted by foreigners who take them far away from the land of their birth is the subject of this Danish-Korean co-production, the first feature by Malene Choi. It’s basically in English, with parts in Danish (with English subtitles) and parts in Korean (with no subtitles, that language not being spoken by the film’s Korean-born, Danish-bred characters).

It all starts with strange, disconcerting electronic sounds and equally unsettling images such as a person disappearing through a door which closes behind them, the shot trimmed in such a way as to leave almost none of the frames of the disappearing person in the shot. Or a woman, who we’ll later discover to be Karoline (Karoline Sofie Lee), viewed from behind as she trudges through lower leg deep mud on a beach (an image which, by accident or design, reminded me of the similarly apocalyptic image towards the start of fellow Dane Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, 2011).

Karoline has left the Denmark she knows from her upbringing to travel to South Korea where she was born to try and find her birth parents. She checks in to a hostel which functions as a temporary base for birth Koreans adopted in other countries trying to track down their parents. She bonds with Thomas (Thomas Hwan) who, like her, was adopted by Danish parents.

Thomas, who is not new to this process as Karoline is, advises her after a frustrating visit to a Holt International Children’s Services (HICS) office where a lady who works there gives Karoline the runaround. It’s not clear whether the lady hasn’t checked hospital records because, as she claims, such records are rarely kept, or because she can’t be bothered, or because it’s somehow against some unwritten law of Korean culture to ask for such things.

Whatever, our female protagonist finds the whole experience frustrating, even harrowing. Thomas advises her that people who threaten such functionaries with their refusal to leave often get told the information they seek. Interestingly, the charity employee is a real life one, the scene staged presumably with her not being told the two actors were actors so that she would treat them like real life adoptees.

This brings us to a fascinating aspect of the film. Its director and many of its actors, including the two leads, are Korean adoptees to other countries (Denmark in the case of the director and her two leads). The script was based on Choi’s own experiences searching for her Korean birth parents. She then encouraged her cast to improvise, drawing on their own experiences of their searches for their families. Serial vox pops with one young woman feel like she’s recounting her own personal experiences. You feel like you’re watching documentary and fiction rolled into one – a most unsettling experience…and yet it works.

Thomas has considerably more luck with his own search and takes Karoline along to meet his mother. In a remarkable single shot scene, son and mother communicate on a very deep level eating a meal she has prepared, despite not sharing the same verbal language and without anything so clichéd as a hug. The effectiveness of this scene is is down in no small part to the extraordinary performance of the actress playing his mother.

Altogether, this is a remarkable, heartbreaking film likely to resonate with anyone adopted into a foreign culture trying to trace their birth family, or even people adopted without the trauma of being sent abroad.

The Return plays in the London Korean Film Festival (LKFF). Watch the film trailer below:

Spaceship

Posted on by victorfraga

This is a gentle, warm and soothing movie, some sort of journey into the dreamy world of a teenage girl. There are nuclear rainbows, unicorns and giant babies flying around. And everything is colourful: from the blue dyed hair of a friend to the clothes, the walls and lights beaming from the sky. Welcome to the strangely charming world of the cyber-goth Lucidia, played here by the beautiful Alexa Davies.

There’s also sadness and mourning infused in all the bright colours and lights. The teenager lost her mother seven years earlier in a swimming pool accident, although it’s never entirely clear what really happened. Her father Gabriel (Antti Reini) is still struggling to move on, and he remains partly alienated from his daughter. He often makes utterances and speaks to himself in Finnish, emphasising his estrangement from those surrounding him. When Lucidia fakes her own abduction by aliens, he is forced to engage with her exotic friends obsessed with mythical creatures and outer space action.

Spaceship is narrated from multiple perspectives, and the story isn’t entirely linear. It’s willfully disjointed, like the mind of the highly imaginative teen. The fast editing, fragmented dialogues and kaleidoscopic montage contribute to a strange feeling of alienation. Conversations about the limits of reality and illusion serve to confirm that not everything in the film is quite what it seems. Both adults and teenagers are searching for a greater purpose, and they are unable to relate to each other along their journey.

Supported by an indie soundtrack from lesser-known artists, Spaceship is overall a pleasant experience. It feels a little bit like a film made for a music album by Saint Etienne: essentially British, fun, easy digestible and calming. It also feels very feminine in its sensitivity and abstractness, despite being directed by a man (Alex Taylor). But not everything is perfect. The manneristic aesthetics subdue the storyline. There’s a very interesting twist in the end, and yet that gets a little diluted in the incandescent lights, fluorescent paint and luminescent clothes. Sometimes it feels you are walking inside the Cyberdog store in Camden instead of watching a film.

This is not the only recent British film about difficulties that different generations have to communicate. The superb The Levelling (Hope Dickson Leach, 2017) also deals with the topic, if from a much less abstract and dreamy perspective.

Spaceship was out in cinemas in May, and it was made available on all major VoD platforms on July 10th.

Clash

Posted on by victorfraga

In 2013 the Egyptian military toppled the Muslim Brotherhood faction, two years after the demise of the decade-long dictator Hosni Mubarak. These events are directly linked to the broader movement in North Africa and the Middle East described as the Arab Spring of 2011. While hailed in West as a revolution of the people against autocratic and despotic regimes, the process wasn’t quite smooth (plus the outcome wasn’t always rosy, just think of Syria). Quite the opposite: these events have been fraught with sectarianism. This Egyptian fiction movie brilliantly synthesises these factional activities. It transposes the political tension into a confined space: a police van.

Quite literally, Clash offers an insider’s view into the conflicts that took place in Egypt in June 2013. Virtually all the action in the movie takes place inside the vehicle, and almost all the views of the outside are filmed from behind the bars of the van windows. It’s as if the filmmaker was a fly on the wall. Or an elephant in the room. What I’m saying is that the first-time filmmaker Mohamed Diab succeeds to capture the tension in every corner of a very small space populated with about 15 nervously haggling Egyptians, and yet his camera is never intrusive. There is a sense of claustrophobia and yet the film is never exploitative of the plight of the different characters, a balance difficult to achieve. The camerawork becomes particularly creative towards the end of the movie, when the action takes a very dangerous turn – once again, in the literal sense.

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Not even a water canon can cool down the intense heat inside the police van.

Factionalism and division of all sorts prevail throughout the movie. Prisoners are categorised according to their political allegiance, nationality, job, gender, age and even their beard status. Unsurprisingly, these people argue relentlessly, and it’s not just their temper that’s at boiling point: the van itself is a heat trap for the African sun, and soon the prisoners begin to feel the effects of the extreme temperature.

The movie also has some teething problems, mainly in the script. The high numbers of characters prevents the filmmaker from developing them more thoroughly, and it’s difficult to feel allegiance towards any individuals. Perhaps this was intentional, as at such erratic times it’s indeed very difficult to pick your most reliable sidekick. There are some attempts at what seems to be sort sort of humour and flare, including a fat guy wearing a pan on his head, a man having to urinate in a bottle and a DJ reminescing his music but somehow this come across as a little contrived and awkward. Despite some flaws, Clash remains an effective and memorable movie.

Clash releases in UK cinemas on April 21st, with a few premiere screenings in London taking place before then. Get an idea of the claustrophobic feel and vibe of the movie by watching the film trailer below: