New York’s Lincoln Center Film Society will showcase Icelandic films in the series “Images from the Edge: Classic and Contemporary Icelandic Cinema”, a nine-day festival running from April 18-26. 

Films will include some Icelandic classics as well as recent films, which in many cases have been based on the work of Icelandic writers. 

The country’s first two sound films, Between Mountain and Shore (Loftur Guðmundsson; 1949) and The Last Farm in the Valley (Ævar Kvaran; 1950), will be screened, as well as Friðrik Þór Friðriksson’s 1987 debut feature film, White Whales.

Also included in the festival are two films based on novels by Indriði G. Þorsteinsson (father of the popular thriller writer, Arnaldur Indriðason): The Girl Gogo (Erik Balling; 1962), an early feature film that was hugely popular and controversial, and Land and Sons (Ágúst Guðmundsson; 1980), a film that was promoted on the international film festival circuit by the Icelandic Film Fund, and is said to have put Iceland on the cinematic map.

Some of the most well-known recent Icelandic films and directors will be screened, such as Friðrik’s Angels of the Universe (2000), Baltasar Kormákur’s Jar City (original title Mýrin (see poster); 2006), and Óskar Jónasson’s Reykjavík-Rotterdam (2008), which was recently remade as Contraband by Baltasar and Mark Wahlberg (2012). 

Many of the filmmakers will be present for Q&A sessions at certain screenings.

In addition, an exhibition entitled “Fabulous Iceland: From Sagas to Novels”, will accompany the film series, featuring interviews with twenty-five contemporary Icelandic writers. 

They discuss the sources of their literary inspiration, which may go back to the Icelandic sagas, to the twentieth-century work of Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Halldór Laxness, or to recent thrillers and literary novels. 

Photographs of the writers by Kristinn Ingvarsson will accompany the interviews, according to the Wall Street Journal.

AS