Niceland

Colour, 35 mm
Iceland, Germany, United Kingdom, Denmark, 2004, 87 min
Section: Official Selection

About the film

The idealistic young Jed and his girlfriend Chloe promise each other that they will get married. When the girl’s beloved cat gets run over, she suffers from depression and refuses to communicate with Jed. The desperate boy sees an eccentric man on television, ruminating on the sense to life. The solitary man lives on a dump where Jed finds him and moves into his caravan. He soon discovers that Max has a painful trauma of his own…The new film by Icelandic director Fridrik Thór Fridriksson is another of his balladic probes into the flipside of consumer society, a symbol of whose insensibility is the television set. The film contains another key motif which sets the difference between normality and madness into perspective, with the eccentric and mentally disabled seen as more perceptive than the consumer stereotypes on the other side.

About the director

Fridrik Thór Fridriksson (b. 1954, Reykjavik) began as an amateur with a Super-8 camera. During his university studies he headed a film club, and was the founder, Editor-in-Chief and critic of the first Icelandic film magazine. He made some remarkable films, and of his fiction work the Oscar-nominated Children of Nature (1991) stands out. In the road movie Cold Fever (1994), a Japanese clerk arrives in Iceland to commemorate the lives of his parents. In Devil’s Island, disillusioned life in the north is confronted with the invasion of American culture during the 1950s. Angels of the Universe (2000), which won the Fipresci Prize at the KVIFF, describes a mentally disabled man interned in a psychiatric hospital. Fridriksson made Falcons in 2002, about a frustrated American who meets an unconventional woman in Iceland. The director was a member of the international jury at the KVIFF in 1995.