A post-metal band performs at a screening of a classic Viking saga. Björk reveals up to take a look at the most recent movies by Pedro Almodovar and Athina Rachel Tsingari. Filmmakers calm down in heat mineral-laden waters on the ocean’s edge. Business members are invited to the President of Iceland’s home to talk concerning the state of the movie enterprise. It’s a typical day on the Reykjavik Worldwide Movie Competition.
However Iceland isn’t simply sizzling springs and Vikings — well-situated between Europe and North America, the nation is booming as a capturing vacation spot. RIFF supplies a key place for filmmakers to community and be taught extra concerning the manufacturing scene within the small nation with the massive manufacturing incentives.
“The pageant is an excellent place for folks to satisfy,” says RIFF director Hrönn Marinósdóttir. “The Icelandic trade is basically rising. I believe we have now a brand new era of actually gifted filmmakers which are very well obtained within the greatest festivals, like in Venice this 12 months.”
The band Solsatir performs at a screening of Viking epic “When the Raven Flies.”
Held in early October when temperatures are nonetheless reasonable and it stays mild previous 7 p.m., the pageant has a distinctly Icelandic taste. Annually, director Marinósdóttir and her group program occasions that may embrace swim-in screenings in one of many metropolis’s many heat public swimming pools, cinematic culinary experiences and music-themed programming like this 12 months’s live performance from steel band Sòlstafir on the retrospective of “When the Raven Flies,” a well-liked 1984 Viking journey. Most screenings happen on the Haskolabio constructing at College of Iceland, which incorporates 5 auditoriums and a bar and lounge the place festivalgoers congregate.
“We attempt to do unusual issues, we have now swim-ins, drive-ins, an ice cave cinema, simply to attraction to totally different sorts of individuals,” Marinósdóttir says.
Marinósdóttir has run the pageant since she began it as a college undertaking 21 years in the past. “To start with, it was very small — 17 movies dedicated to Icelanders dwelling overseas, Canadians with Icelandic ancestry for instance,” she explains.
“There have been many challenges with discovering the finances, and in addition politics as a result of I’m not a filmmaker. Some filmmakers in Iceland have been stunned that out of the blue a journalist, a girl, began an occasion like this,” Marinósdóttir remembers.
This 12 months’s occasion included grasp lessons and retrospectives with particular friends Nastassja Kinski, Bong Joon-Ho, Swedish music video and have director Jonas Akerlund and Greek filmmaker Tsingari. A screening of the 2003 animated Daft Punk film “Interstella 5555” featured a number of the filmmakers in attendance.
The Business Days part hosted discussions like an AI masterclass, a workshop on wardrobe and make-up, a panel on the way forward for the trade, and a works-in-progress screening. Business members have been additionally invited to a roundtable dialogue with Iceland’s president Halla Tómasdóttir. On the president’s residence, Björk, maybe the nation’s most well-known determine, together with Tsingari, Akerlund, and others, mentioned the significance of preserving group areas like file retailers and unbiased cinemas — each to help artists, have interaction younger folks, and assist battle the loneliness epidemic.
Business Days members additionally bonded at a discipline journey to the beautiful Hvammsvik Scorching Springs and a go to to Thorufoss waterfall, a key filming web site for “Sport of Thrones.”
Head of programming Frederic Boyer, who additionally serves as creative director of Tribeca Competition and Les Arcs in France, says bringing filmmakers to the pageant attracts an enthusiastic response. “We have now a terrific viewers that loves music, that loves Bong Joon Ho, that loves Daft Punk, and that is able to take in,” Boyer says. After the screening of Tsingari’s “Harvest,” filmgoers have been so engaged, Boyer says, that they requested questions for a full hour.
“A New Type of Wilderness”
Courtesy of A5 Movie
This 12 months’s profitable movies included the Golden Puffin award for Japanese movie “Tremendous Comfortable Eternally” by Kohei Igarashi, which the jury known as “delicate and luminous.”
The Totally different Tomorrow award, given to movies that facilitate societal dialogue and illuminate options to native and international issues, went to the documentary “A New Type of Wilderness,” by Silje Evensmo Jacobsen, a visually wealthy examine of a nature-loving British-Norwegian household adjusting to a brand new life.
The Reykjavik Worldwide Movie Competition ran Sept. 26 to Oct. 6.
