Archive of films Niceland / Niceland

Iceland / Germany / United Kingdom / Denmark
2004, 87 min

Section: Official Selection - Competition
Year: 2004

The idealist Jed and his girlfriend Chloe promise that they will marry each other. The girl then suffers from depression when her cat dies. The desperate young man moves into an old caravan on a dump where he meets the eccentric Max. In his new film, director Fridrik Thór Fridriksson again describes the flipside of consumer society and the quest for happiness. 


Synopsis

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

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.

Contacts

Zik Zak Filmworks
Hverfisgata 14 a, IS - 101, Reykjavik
Iceland
Tel: +354 511 201 9
Fax: +354 511 301 9
E-mail: [email protected]

About the film

Color, 35 mm
World premiere

Section: Official Selection - Competition
   
Director: Fridrik Thór Fridriksson
Screenplay: Huldar Breidfjord
Dir. of Photography: Morten Soborg
Music: Mugison
Editor: Anders Refn, Sigvaldi J. Kárason
Producer: Skuli Fr. Malmguist, Thor S.Sigurionsson
Production: Zik Zak Filmworks, koprodukce / co-production: Nimbus Film, Tradewind Pictures, Film and Music Entertainment
Cast: Gary Lewis, Martin Compston, Gudrun Bjarnadottir, Peter Capaldi, Kerry Fox, Timmy Lang, Shauna MacDonald
Contact: Zik Zak Filmworks

Guests

Stefanie Zeitler

Distributor

Fridrik Thór Fridriksson


Laufey Guðjónsdóttir

Film Institution Rep.

Thorsten Schaumann

Festival Organizer


Michael Weber

Buyer, Sales Agent

Helmut G. Weber


Tobias Pausinger

Skuli Malmquist

Producer


Gary Lewis

Thor Sigurjonsson

Producer


Gisli Orn Gardarsson

Actor / Film Director

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