Let’s start at the beginning. In an upper class American boarding school, Robert, a stubborn, sex obsessed, teen loner masturbates in front of porn videos in his room while his buddy Dave deals cocaine. Elsewhere, students line up in a long corridor where they are given medication. At the canteen, one says, “You know, I fucked your sister,” “That’s coke whores for you.” says another, the way you’d say, “Pass the salt.” Meanwhile the school principal regularly reminds everyone of the school’s gentle ethics in a setting that looks like a chapel with a flag.
Then suddenly death rears its ugly head. The Thalbert sisters, pretty young twins who are the school’s muses, overdose in front of Robert’s camera. He is there by accident, fascinated, shocked or stunned - it is hard to say.
Up until then, there’s nothing new under the sun in this teen chronicle of the unease of the wealthy. Except that what interests Antonio Campos are the images.
These are the film’s real heroes; enigmatic, omnipresent and disturbing. They are pumped out by YouTube, picked up by cell phones, recorded by Robert for his video workshop or forbidden by the institution to save its reputation and its wealthy clients.
The director uses many sources and presents banal or terrible images on the same level. He seeks out reality but is aware it always slips away from him. Yet the film that Robert makes at the school’s request about the Thalbert sisters, with its flaws, its silences and the parents who suddenly have nothing to say, seems more ”true” than the empty, reedited film that ends up being shown to the school assembly with its endless repetition of “I will miss you,” over grandiloquent music.
If there is trauma it is in this camouflage; the gentle, muffled hushing-up, that like the medication handed out to the students is supposed to prevent anyone getting upset.
The images, like urges, keep coming. And Antonio Campos, like his stubborn hero, keeps following them, like an attentive and disturbing entomologist.

Emmanuelle Mougne

More information about L’atalante.

Read Guy Maddin’s interview

Guy Maddin’s body of work is as beautiful as it is confounding and delirious. He incorporates the language of past cinema, with which he is most intimately familiar from his countless hours of film viewing, and combines this with a pre-cinematic sensibility learned from the books he voraciously devours. A man of prodigious intellectual appetites, Maddin’s many interests and obsessions can easily be discerned in his work.


Selected Filmography :

1988 - Tales from the Gimli Hospital
1990 - Archangel
1992 - Careful
2002 - Dracula, Pages From a Virgin’s Diary
2003 - Cowards Bend the Knee
2003 - The Saddest Music in the World
2006 - Brand Upon the Brain!
2007 - My Winnipeg

You come from Winnipeg. What does that city mean for you, for your inspiration and all your work for nearly 15 years ?
Winnipeg means “Muddy waters”, because it is built on two rivers, which are very muddy, you can’t even see your hand when you stick it in it. For me, it’s been my town for my entire life and it’s a very strange and enchanted place right in the middle of the continent. But it’s very isolated, it’s like the middle of a doughnut, there’s nothing there, nothing and everything. All my emotional memories, all my history, everything that defines what I am come from this hole, this nothingness, and it’s kind of a muddy nothingness, like muddy waters. I think, when I was put down for my very first nap as a baby I never quite entirely woke up, my life has always been like a slightly confusing dreamy experience, which I feel tangled up in my pyjamas all the time, I can never quite get untangled, I can never quite do the right thing for more than two days in a row. So it’s been a bit of a struggle for me. Luckily, when I started reading books as an adult I started to discover all the writers with similar experiences -Dostoievski and Kafka-, people that always seemed to struggle to do what they really wanted to do, I learnt that I wasn’t alone in the world and I decided I wanted to be a writer. But I was a good reader enough to know I would never be a great writer but I discovered really exciting primitive filmmakers experimental filmmakers and I gave up the idea of being a writer and I decided to try to be a filmmaker. In the last twenty years I made nine movies since Tales from the Gimli Hospital was completed in 1988. Just in the last couple of years I made Brand Upon the Brain! and My Winnipeg and I made countless shorts, I don’t even know how many, sometimes I make a short just because I get lonely, I invite people to a dinner party and I shoot. All the movies have been based on my experiences, my lousy experiences, or dreamy experiences with love or death, and they are dreamy experiences assembled using a filming vocabulary both ancient and modern, I just always believed that I could not use as a filmmaker just contemporary vocabulary, it would be like using only one colour for a painter. I’m always switching my vocabulary around in my films and I’ve been telling really autobiographical movies, not that I’m thinking I’m so fascinating but I think of it as a way of making people find themselves in me, I think I figured out a way of framing myself as an every person. Every person is really interesting, every person is a genius, and awful, brave, a real mixture of things.

In Brand Upon the Brain! the family and the autobiographical part seems more present than ever.
It’s getting very specific, the more I think about my family, the more I realize what a strange grand-guignol and melodramatic family I’ve had. And so in the last few films I just used entire episodes, changing only a couple of names just to keep my family from suing me and I just put them in. In Brand Upon the Brain!, the main story is my older sister hitting puberty and my mother, who’s very puritanical, trying to prevent her from being a sexual being, most of the movie trying to push my sister’s breast back into her chest and pushing her pubic hair back into her pelvis, trying to reverse the whole adolescence process. And I’m right behind my sister, growing my own pubic hair and watching with great interest and compelled by feelings I don’t understand, compelled by feelings I need to obey, and there is so much hornyness and heart-sickness in this battle between my sister and my mother I choose sides of my sister. Hard things happened to my sister, she fell in love with a young boy when she was about 14, a boy who turned out to be a girl.

Really??
Yes, and I just put it in the movie. My sister went mad at me but we sort of made peace about it. It was very embarrassing for me to mention it now, after all these years, but these were pretty exciting times. I wouldn’t trade my teenage years with anyone because there was such sexual excitement in the air -having a boyfriend and then discover it’s a girlfriend!- and then I got a crush on her boyfriend/girlfriend, I don’t know, it was a weird threesome turning to a foursome.

In this movie you mix a lot of genres, grand-guignol, teen detectives…
Teen detectives are just so sexy, they’re always sneaking around, after the dark, going places they’re not supposed to go, always pressing up against each other so they can feel each others hot breathe on their necks, things like that. Teen detectives are the best. And I always liked grand-guignol, I always liked lighthouses, one of the grand-guignol plays I read years ago was called ‘Orgy in the Lighthouse’ and then I saw it in San Francisco about a year ago, it looked really good, there’s a lot of nudity in this play but the actors said they take their clothes off if the crowd’s big enough, so I was lucky the night I went, there was a pretty good crowd. I’ve always loved childhood reminiscence movies, there are two French movies of this kind in my favourites: Zero de conduite by Jean Vigo and Jeux Interdits. I love those two movies. I’ve always wanted to make a child recollection movie. I think silent films still does some things better than talking pictures because silent films are just one big step away from literal mindedness and a step towards fairy tales and the way you remember and misremember things. It’s most important the way we misremember a childhood because we found myths about our own childhood and the basic way we understand the world is founded upon the way we made mistaken models when we were very young. And every now and then we repeat mistakes we made as children without realizing it because we started thinking of the world in a wrong way and never quite corrected ourselves entirely. I like the feelings childhood recollection cinema give when they’re working. We all watched movies when we were children and so the feeling of watching movies and of being a child are connected, and then you get older, there’s not so much wonderness left in your life but there still is cinema. Even if my movies are very adult themes, and they always are, I always try to get that sense of childhood wonder.

This is your first film made out of Winnipeg, was it something important for you about it?
Yes, it’s my first foreign film. I went to Seattle, I had been there as a 6-year-old for the Seattle World Fair in 1962 but I hadn’t been back ever since. I got offered to make a feature film by this strange utopian not-for-profit film company and the conditions where that I had to use a Seattle cast and a Seattle crew of helpers and I had to shoot it in Seattle. And so I just landed off an airplane, back to a city I hadn’t been to since early childhood and made a childhood recollection film. It was shot on shores near Washington but it looks exactly the same as in my childhood, it’s crazy, the water looked the same, the beach looked the same, it’s really incredible. That was something when I had the actors react certain episodes from my childhood, it was very disturbing for me, because they got it. It was very emotional sometimes, I once even broke down and cried, I had to excuse myself and go to a far corner off the studio. Then I realized I wasn’t actually upset because of my childhood memories, I was crying out of pride, I was so proud of being so clever (laughter).

Is it easier for you to work like that or with a more professional casting like in The Saddest Music in the World with Isabella Rossellini?
I actually really enjoy working with both experienced actors and newcomers. With newcomers you never know what you’re gonna get -so unpredictable- and other times it’s just nice to have someone that looks great on film and who is very professional. I’m happy with either.

You also had experiences with opera, in Berlin for example.
Brain Upon the Brain! played in Berlin a year and a half ago at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, a 1800-seat opera house, sold out, there was a 33-people orchestra playing the score of the movie, Isabella Rossellini was narrating, most intriguing of all perhaps was the sound effects artist performing over 600 sound effects of the movie. They were wearing a black coat uniform and rubber boots, it was very intriguing to watch, the eyes going back and forth to the movie, the performers and Isabella Rossellini, the orchestra, the sound was very good and it just went over really nicely. It’s more relaxing for me to watch it with the pre-recorded sound track but I’ve grown to become a bit of an excitement junkie and the terror makes the beer really taste good after.

Jean-Jacques Rue

Read Guy Maddin’s pick of the week.

Read the Brand Upon the Brain! review.

Read Guy Maddin’s interview and watch the trailer now!

Synopis: Whatever are young “Guy Maddin’s” parents really up to in their lighthouse home/orphanage on a chilly remote island? Overbearing Mother tracks her son’s every move, bellowing for him to come home over the “Aerophone” just as something interesting is about to happen! And poor Sis, his older sister (who is rapidly blossoming into a young woman)–Mother will never let her have any fun! The intrigue continues as deranged Mother, hellbent on restoring her youth and sinister Scientist-Father who is sequestered night and day in his basement laboratory, engage in diabolical, secret experimentation. When new parents of recently adopted children from the orphanage notice strange wounds on the youngsters’ necks, a pair of teen sleuths, Wendy and her brother Chance, known as “The Lightbulb Kids,” appear on the island to investigate–and in the process, inspire Guy’s first crush and Sis’ first love affair. The lurid family secrets that unfold are positively shocking.

Françoise Duru

More details about Guy Maddin’s films:
Archangel
Careful
Dracula
Cowards Bend the Knee
The Saddest Music in the World

More informations about Playtime.

José Luis Guerin was born in Barcelona. He started his career directing experimental films from 1975 to 1983, then directed his first feature film in 1983, Los Motivos de Berta. His film received a special price at the Berlin Forum. In 1988, José Luis Guerin directed the Spanish episode of City Life – the other episodes being directed by Reichenbach, Kieslowski, Agresti, Tarr, Sen et Rijneke. City Life was awarded in Berlin, Rotterdam and Montreal Film Festivals. In 1990, José Luis Guerin directed Innisfree, presented in competition at Cannes International Film Festival. In 1997, Tren de Sombras - presented during the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes - obtained the Golden and Silver Melies awarded by the European Federation of Fantasy Film Festivals. Then, in 2001, José Luis Guerin directed En construccion, awarded in San Sebastian Festival and, in 2007, En la ciudad de Sylvia, selected by the 2007 Venice Film Festival.

The first pioneered a new genre, the documentary series, in relating in six episodes the 1993 school year at the Garcia Lorca Junior High School in St Denis, in the suburbs of Paris.
The second is fiction that takes a school as its setting. For his fourth feature film (after Human Resources, Time Out and Heading South), Laurent Cantet has adapted the book of the same name by François Bégaudeau, which described a French teacher’s year at a junior high in the north east of Paris.

Two “classroom movies”
“Classroom movies” are practically a genre in their own right. Among those that spring to mind, there are comedies (Les Sous Doués (The Under-gifted) by Zidi, Kindergarten Cop by Reitman: the classroom as a backdrop for fooling around), and tragedies (school as the first of oppressive institutions – Young Torless by Schlondorff, If by Lindsay Anderson, etc.). In the second case, sometimes a teacher who is “not like the others” lets in a breeze of freedom (a romantic version as in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society, or libertarian style as in Seeking Asylum by Marco Ferreri). Sometimes, too, things are reversed and the violence of the outside world bursts in (Blackboard Jungle by Richard Brooks back in 1955, Class 84 by Mark Lester, It All Starts Today by Tavernier or in a completely different style, Elephant by Gus Van Sant…).
Logically, this fertile playground most often attracts filmmakers interested in political and social issues or groups (Ferreri, Kiarostami, Philibert, Tavernier, Wiseman…).
Mariana Otero and Laurent Cantet undeniably belong here. But School Law and The Class do not fit into these categories. Heirs of a complex world in which “big causes” have disappeared, these two films make do with presenting characters grappling with the complexity of their situation. Both of them see school as a watching ground for “human chaos”. Mariana Otero says she did not want to make a film about learning, but about the law: how it is laid down, negotiated and practiced. Cantet’s film is in the same style. What matters here is language. He looks at how speech circulates and the relationship to power and authority, rather than a depiction of learning in the strict sense. For both filmmakers, school is where people confront one another, size each other up, show respect and try to get along. These films are “team players” (The Class ends with a game of soccer between teachers and students), which doesn’t stand in the way of a few close-ups on certain characters. It’s not easy for a film to give equal airtime all the way.

A similar structure: the issue of time and space
To render this confrontation, the two of them chose to be both radical and modest. Both opted for the same “time and space”: a school year and the closed environment of a junior high school.
Classroom, staff room, corridors, yard and school principal’s office: it all happens here, in a life governed by bells (which sound strangely like an alarm at Garcia Lorca Junior High). Inside this space, there is a lot of noise and cameras are on full alert – 3 cameras for Laurent Cantet’s film and the flexibility of a small crew for Mariana Otero. They share an objective: revealing classroom drama by taking their time. One was filmed over a period of a whole year. The other was constructed around (separate) workshops for students and teachers.
By keeping off-screen the private lives of both teachers and students, psychology and overly obvious determinism is avoided. This was particularly risky for the fiction because the film gives little opportunity to identify with the characters, preferring to explore situations of interaction rather than inner worlds.

Fiction / Documentary
In Laurent Cantet’s film, we leave the school grounds only once: at the start of the film, François Marin has a coffee at the bar of a café, then enters the school with two colleagues. The same is true in Mariana Otero’s documentary: a group of teachers, tired of strikes that don’t get anywhere, decide, as a last resort, to visit the School Inspectorate.
The out-of-school scene in The Class is individual. In School Law it is collective. This difference indicates contrasting approaches. For the sake of efficiency, Cantet focuses on the individual, structuring the film around attentive close-ups on faces. During the film, a story emerges. The teacher veers onto slippery ground. Drama slowly builds. The film ends with the expulsion of a student. For Otero, the camera is hand-held. She films the yard and the meetings. There are more people per shot. She takes in the “whole” school.
Paradoxically, the strength of each film lies in its ability to take on the characteristics of the “other” genre. In School Law characters disappear or reappear depending on events. Stories follow on from one another, which makes relevant the use of the series. On the contrary, in The Class, the actor-students and Bégaudeau, who plays the role of the teacher himself, contribute extra reality to the fiction.

Similar intentions
It is no accident that the classrooms chosen were in junior highs with a reputation for being difficult. In junior highs, the whole process of social sorting has not yet taken place. And in so-called tough neighborhoods, the issue of “getting along” is even more urgent.
These films use school to reflect their era, assuming that the outside will invite itself in – starting with the issue of identity and origins. As Khoumba and Esmeralda say to their teacher François Marin, why use the name Bill in an example, rather than Aïssata?
Furthermore, both of them incidentally raise the fundamental (and unresolved) question of what school can pass down today and reveal a world grappling with a possible breakdown in meaning.
We hear over and over, “You move, you run, you shout, you fly, why do you come to school?” looping a teacher’s sentence like a nursery rhyme in the credits of School Law. Fifteen years later, Henriette echoes her in The Class by saying to her teacher at the end of the year, “I didn’t learn anything this year. I don’t get what we’re doing.”
Through François Marin and the staff at Garcia Lorca Junior High neither of these two films gives an answer but they both give the question a real workout.

Emmanuelle Mougne.

More details about School Law available now on DVD and VOD.
Also check out the film blog including free videos.

Baltasar Kormákur is an Icelandic actor and a stage and film director. Nowadays he is best known for his work as a director of films like multi-awarded 101 Reykjavik. Also a producer through his production company, BlueEyes, (he co-produced Stormy Weather by Solveig Anspach for instance), Baltasar Kormakur has just finished his fifth feature-length film, White Night Wedding, while Jar City has just been released in French theaters.

Read our interview with Baltasar Kormakur on the occasion of the French theatrical release of Jar City.

You started as an actor, you directed theatre productions, how did you start to direct films and how did those prior experiences nourish your work as a director?
I felt all the time that I was going to make a film, I played in a lot of them and I felt more and more the need to do it myself. When I did my first film I thought “This is who I wanted to become”. You are asked this question all your life “what do you want to be ?” I never really knew but I found it and that’s why I’ve stayed there. I occasionally play as an actor and I do theatre once in a while as well ; this background gives me a different perspective on the storytelling. I’m mostly interested in characters and telling stories through characters rather than using the plot as a way to hang the characters on them. I don’t mind doing action or little effects if it’s needed -I’ve done stunts or stuff like that but it’s not what gives me a great close-up on characters or human behaviour, this is what gets me excited. I’ve been offered to do big Hollywood movies, it’s not because I’m against them, it’s just that they don’t get me going, I couldn’t do it well, I would need viagra to be able to direct these movies, my interest has to come from the inside.

Why did you choose to turn this bestseller into a movie?
First of all, when I bought it it was not a bestseller, it was the first book in line, he [Arnaldur Indridason] had made a couple of books that were not successful, this one was the first to become successful but I bought it before that. I read it and I thought it had very strong premises: it takes place in Iceland, it’s about characters, it talks about the old times in Iceland in a certain way -without going backwards but it’s connected to that- and how our modern society is going in another direction, maybe too fast, and the science of being able to find out your grandmother’s secrets when she was a young woman -probably playful like most of the young women like we want to have them but then you don’t want to know about that when it’s your grandmother! This is a fantastic story to work with but it took me a lot of time because it didn’t work straight from the page. It’s only when I found this new way of structuring it that it could work as a film. It took me six years to do that starting from when I bought the title -by that time the book had done really well. But it has no importance, the film has to work on its own.

How did you work on the screenplay? What was the adaptation work like?
I didn’t work linearly from the novel because the story is told from the point of view of the investigator finding a corpse until he finds the man he is looking for. Then you have the flashback of his story and then it continues. This didn’t work for me, it was just not interesting. Not until I kind of figured out it was the drama of two fathers losing a child and then I decided to tell their two stories in parallel, then I got really excited about this idea ; I tried to find other movies that were made the same way but I couldn’t find any. My co-producers thought it would be too difficult, that the people who had read the novel would not like it, that this would kill the movie, so I said “then I won’t do the movie”! It ended up my way and I think it was the right think to do. For some people it’s too complicated but you can never please everyone. I’m more worried about having people ahead of me in the cinema instead of a little bit behind, that’s ok, then they will have to go again to definitely figure it out! (laughter)

Did you want to make it easier for the audience by deciding with your cinematographer to use strong dominants to mark the different time periods?
This was always in our mind but I probably pushed that a little bit more in the post production. That came naturally from the story but I also wanted to hold people a little bit backwards, it’s a little different but people don’t realize it right away, it’s a part of how things come together and you understand it. I have been making films in studio, bigger budgets, but I wanted to do this one on location: no studios, no tricks, make it also for as little money as possible, the bigger the movies become, the more conventional they have to be. I wanted also to put a test on myself. So I used Fuji film, which is the cheapest. Not only for money but also for the colours: I really like its green tones and it’s more true to Iceland than Kodak. Kodak is more Hollywood -more yellow-, Fuji is greener, that’s why it wanted it. Then we decided to use old lenses and shoot it on 16mm but the wider shots are shot on 35mm -we used an old camera and it’s fantastic because we decided to use no tricks, it’s the best school I had as a director.

What were your influences while shooting this kind of genre movie? Were there clichés you wanted to avoid?
First of all I wanted to avoid as much as possible the clichés and pitfalls of thrillers, all the fake surprises. What I wanted to do is to build the tension inside, from the inside of your brain, not from sound effects. In my films, especially while working on this one, I want people to be able to watch it again and that everything makes sense too. It’s very easy to make the tricks ; there are movies that trick you and when you watch them again, you see the trick is not believable because the character wouldn’t be doing that at that time. I wanted to make the story slowly built up to raise tension, I’m not tensed in cinema with somebody running and shooting guns, there must be something else, something about relationships, about the things possibly happening more than when it happens. This is the kind of energy I was thinking about. There are also two ways that have become very overused in cinema today, like in old horror films: you use things to shock people for no reason, just to make it disgusting. On smaller films, more arty films, they have to create the cliché of only the reaction, you don’t see what you see, this has been done endlessly, it was original when it started but now “ok, you’re using that trick”. Like you do in theatre -it happens off-stage. But I really wanted to show when there was a reason to show. And then show it all. Not like hide for the old ladies because they can’t take a dead body, I really wanted people to smell the film, feel the film, almost taste the film, that’s why I never shy away.

The most disturbing thing in your film may be the scene when Erlendur eats his sheep’s head.
It’s exenstialistic -the death, the meat, the rotenning, this is life. When you go into a hotel like the one we are in now [Murano hotel], they try to hide the life, you sleep in a bed and feel like nobody has ever slept in it but of course people slept and had sex in it. But they’re hiding it, which is culture. It’s interesting in a film to embrace it. This is the thing these people eat and the actor loves it, it’s no faking there, it’s his favourite food. It’s like the old style of food and when the movie came out, it was on the cover of the biggest paper in Iceland that sheep heads sales had gone three hundred per cent up!

You said once in an interview that you were “sick of these Icelandic films with endless beautiful landscapes”. In your movie the landscapes are used to mark a frontier between a modern urban Iceland and a more archaic one?
The thing about landscape is that it’s almost like sex for me, if it’s not used for a purpose to tell you something it’s useless. In Jar City, it’s the memory of the cold wastelands, the endless distances between people and little villages, and sitting in your car on the road to visit your grandmother, sitting in your car forever and there’s nothing to see, it’s a different beauty, it’s also a way for me to show Erlendur’s emotions without having to give them verbally. You get his emotions through those pictures. It’s lonely, it’s almost biblical, he’s almost like a missionary, trying to correct things on his own.

Family relationships are at the heart of the movie, like it was in 101 Reykjavik and The Sea, is this something particularly important for you?
Relationships between parents and a child is something that you are one side of in the beginning of your life and then you go to the other side of it -or actually in the middle of it when you have your parents and children-, it’s something that is one of the biggest part of the journey through life, and when your child becomes your friend and stop being your child but is still your child, you have to learn as a parent not to interfere with your child’s life at a certain point -this thing nobody taught you, nobody taught you to be a parent. This is a journey you’re going through and part of that, in my case, is to tell stories about that. I think the brightest happy end I ever made is in Jar City, which is about him opening up to his daughter and sharing his thoughts with her instead of opposing and she actually caresses him. She really feels she needs to help her father, this is a turn in relationships, and for me an opportunity of growing from there. It’s not the end of the book, we decided in the editing room it should be the end.

Why did you choose the Police Choir for the film soundtrack?
This came for the fact that in a lot of films policemen are portrayed in a very negative way. But when you check the basis of the job, it’s actually very beautiful, it’s to help human beings walking through life without bumping too hard into each other, and when it happens: to find a solution. The basis of the job is very beautiful and I also started to talk to them, to investigate things and they were really close: “How does this affect you?”, “Oh we have no problem to deal with that” and then they start opening up and you realize they actually carry it up. All those family dramas they walk into ; they didn’ tell me but this is a unique thing in Iceland that the police sing, this is a big choir, they travel into the world to sing, and my understanding of that is that it’s a way to do something beautiful together. They’re always arresting people, fighting, and twice a week they sing together, in harmony. It’s not in the book but it’s something I really wanted, they’re like singing for all of us, trying to help us. It shows the police in a different perspective.

Interviewed by Olivier Gonord in Paris on September 5, 2008.

Read Baltasar Kormakur’s Pick of the Week.

As the story unfolds we follow a policeman from forgotten rural Iceland to the very heart of modern technology’s greatest symbol, where detective Erlendur must stir up memories and reveal buried secrets. Memory is at the centre of a story which tells Erlendur’s investigation at the same time as; in an earlier time space continuum, we discover the life of a man who has been destroyed by the loss of a child. The relationship with the father is also one of the main elements of a story that explores the issue of transmission in a full frontal and metaphorical way. Continuing the mistakes of elders, transmitting an evil that should no longer be spread, parent-child relationships are the main subject of the film. At the same time as he carries out his investigation, detective Erlendur renews his relationship with his wayward teenage daughter who finds her way home after an unfortunate pregnancy. Genetic heritage plays a key role in this theme and in the investigation leading Erlendur to the heart of the DeCode Genetics Corporation that was created in 2002 and was a major event in Iceland. 95% of all Icelandic residents were genetically “registered” in that year and the consequences thereof are cleverly exploited by the novel and film as they focus a variety of fascinating reflections on the subject.

The opening sequence sets the formal tone of the film: from the little girl’s hospital room to preparing her body for burial, the bluish light bathes images in a gritty grain and provides a specific and carefully defined focus. The images, especially those clearly delineated shots that are sometimes yellow or blue depending on the timing of depicted events are the remarkable work of director of photography Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson whose work we recently admired in the refreshing Back Soon by Solveig Anspach. In order to film his characters closely and best use the Icelandic landscapes without falling into an easy “postcard” aesthetic, the director depicts a country that is drawn between its archaic moments and its modernity and offers a great alternative to formatted American thrillers while avoiding their equally formulaic stumbling blocks.

Read the interview with Baltasar Kormakur about Jar City.

More details about Ugetsu (1953) by Kenji Mizoguchi.
Read the full interview with Wasis Diop.

Younger brother of filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, whom he worked with a lot on his movies, Wasis Diop, as a musician, gave birth to a sensitive and very diverse work, a true invitation to travel. Whether sampled by Dr Dre & Track-master for “The Firm”, or chosen for the soundtrack of “The Thomas Crown Affair” by John McTiernan with Pierce Brosnan and Nina Simone, or for the films of a master of French cinema like Techiné, Wasis Diop continues his route with integrity and musical talent that make him an artist impossible to circumvent in World Music.