Ragnar Bjarnasson career spans 60 years. Now at 75 he is ready to examine his career and allow us access to the idol Ragnar Bjarnason who is much loved by all ages. The camera follows him during a grand performance in honor of his seventy fifth birthday and gives us a glimpse of the pendulous chances of his life and career as a singer and performer.
The Stained Glass Windows had been salvaged from Coventry’s medieval cathedral before it was bombed out by German forces but in 1942 they simply disappeared. Much later, it is discovered that they had found their way to Iceland. How did this happen? It is a mystery of conflicting stories, misplaced documents and confusing contradictions.
Birgir Andresson is an artist that does not explain his work; instead he tells stories related to it. His collected work describes a deep thinker that never did preen on his work.
The film touches on a variety of subjects including finance, corruption, cronyism, nepotism, the privatisation of the Icelandic banking system, tax havens, connections between politics and business, the Kitchenware Revolution, the Citizens' movement, and how the Icelandic government reacted to warning signs leading up to the collapse of the banking system in 2008. People who are interviewed include Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson, William K. Black, Robert Wade, employees at Transparency International, Eva Joly and Jón Baldvin Hannibalsson. In their search for answers the filmmakers travel extensively and among the locations they visit are London, Guernsey, Luxembourg and Road Town in The British Virgin Islands.
This is a documentary about a teacher from Reykjavik in search of her roots and interested in the preservation of old tales and history. Our story opens in the remote Mýrar cemetery in the West Fjords. The narrator is standing by her forefathers´ grave, which is overgrown and neglected and she senses her dead ancestors call out and implore her to do something. Beautiful irons cross lies on the grave of a young boy who died in the middle of the nineteenth century. Her curiosity aroused, the narrator discovers the story behind the iron cross memorial by talking to the archaeologist, Gunnar Bollason. She then goes on to discover similar iron crosses in cemeteries elsewhere in the southwest of the country. We visit the town of Þingeyri and watch as the broken iron cross from the family grave is repaired by the skilled craftsmanship of Kristján Gunnarsson at his engineering workshop, a workplace with an unbroken tradition going all the way back to 1913.
Four years in the making, the film features interviews and footage never seen before, as well as older scenes of John and Yoko together, in private and performing in public. Yoko Ono talks about her and John Lennon’s love and life together, about the art they made together and their struggle for peace and justice, including the imaginative methods they used to get their message across: “Give peace a chance.” Lennon’s music provides an inspirational soundtrack to a story that that began more than forty years ago and is still unfolding. In 2007, when Yoko Ono dedicated the Imagine Peace Tower to John’s memory she added: “My love for you is forever.”
The scholar Sveinn Bergsveinsson, a Communist in the 1930s, was trapped in Berlin by the outbreak of World War II and forced to work for the Nazi propaganda machine. Returning to Iceland, sick with tuberculosis, he found himself branded by both sides of the cold war political divide and barred from academic work. In desperation, he emigrated to East-Germany where he became a respected professor. He always hoped to return home but died in East-Berlin in 1988, a year before the wall came down. He left behind a wealth of documents, photographs, film and voice recordings which form the basis of this narrative.
Stomu and Sverrir are friends and accomplices. They have known each other for many years and have already worked together. Stomu has been to Iceland to take part in Sverrir’s premieres. During Sverrir’s tour of 15 Japanese cities in December 2005, the two artists spent a lot of time together in Kyoto and discussed creating a new project that would permit their sensibilities to meet. The aim of this film is to give us an insight into this artistic friendship. The two artists create a musical project especially for our film in which Stomu’s mineral sounds encounters Sverrir’s unique voice.
Dieu Hao Do, whose parents found refuge in Germany and were part of the Chinese minority in Vietnam, embarks on a very personal journey to meet his relatives on three continents. He confronts his mother, encounters his aunts and uncles in Germany, Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Ho Chi Minh City and asks, “What are your memories of the war in Vietnam? Of the exodus? And how did the refugee experience and torn-apart state of the family affect you over the years?” And he wants to know: “Can the trauma of war be inherited?”
Faceland is a documentary where young Icelanders express their views on the ever-growing, popular online connection program called Facebook. What does the belly dancing, horror movie fanatic, Guðrún think about the endless relationship status updates? How does the nurse student Gunnar describe how users can discover your superhero match?. Does Facebook really connect different people with similar interests? Or are its users guilty of cyber-stalking and spying? Six young Icelanders tell about their lives on- and offline, how Facebook has become a major factor in their social communications. Even if the cyber-world is here to stay, viewers can’t help but wonder how long this fast-growing communication program will last. The movie was shot in March 2009, at which time 45% of Icelandic population were facebook users. Almost all individuals between the ages 20-30 were active users and in every café, every bus and school people were talking about it.
The repetition and the circumstances increasingly take their toll when isolation, claustrophobia and paranoia set in. As if We Existed is an interpretation of an art piece by Ragnar Kjartansson who represented Iceland at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. His piece, The End, was a six month long performance.
Over the course of five years, a pair of documentary filmmakers visited the American prairies, the Mediterranean coast, and the Mongolian steppe to better understand one of the longest-running, human-predator relationships – falconry.